
Class J_iX ^ 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



PEEFACE 



I HAVE often been asked to select and epitomize the 
practical and especially the pedagogical conclusions of 
my large volumes on Adolescence, published in 1904, in 
such form that they may be available at a minimum cost 
to parents, teachers, reading circles, normal schools, and 
college classes, by whom even the larger volumes have 
been often used. This, with the cooperation of the pub- 
lishers and with the valuable aid of Superintendent C. N. 
Kendall of Indianapolis, I have tried to do, following 
in the main the original text, with only such minor 
changes and additions as were necessary to bring the 
topics up to date, and adding a new chapter on moral 
and religious education. For the scientific justification 
of my educational conclusions I must, of course, refer to 
the larger volumes. The last chapter is not in "Ado- 
lescence," but is revised from a paper printed elsewhere. 
I am indebted to Dr. Theodote L. Smith of Clark Uni- 
versity for verification of all references, proof-reading, 
and many minor changes. 

G. Stanley Hall. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. — Pre-Adolescence. 

Introduction: Characterization of the age from eight to 
twelve — The era of recapitulating the stages of primitive 
human development — Life close to nature — The age also 
for drill, habituation, memory work, and regermination — 
Adolescence superposed upon this stage of life, but very- 
distinct from it 1 

II. — The Muscles and Motor Powers in General. 

Muscles as organs of the will, of character, and even of 
thought — The muscular virtues — Fundamental and acces- 
sory muscles and functions — The development of the mind 
and of the upright position — Small muscles as organs of 
thought — School lays too much stress upon these — Chorea 
— Vast numbers of automatic movements in children — • 
Great variety of spontaneous activities — Poise, control, and 
spurtiness — Pen and tongue wagging — Sedentary school 
life vs. free out-of-door activities — Modern decay of muscles, 
especially in girls — Plasticity of motor habits at puberty . 7 

III. — Industrial Education. 

Trade classes and schools, their importance in the interna- 
tional market — Our dangers and the superiority of German 
workmen — The effects of a tariff — Description of schools 
between the kindergarten and the industrial school — Equal 
salaries for teachers in France — Dangers from machinery — 
The advantages of life on the old New England farm — Its 
resemblance to the education we now give ^groes and 
Indians — Its advantage for all-sided muscular develop- 
ment 29 

vii 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

IV. — Manual Training and Sloyd. 

History of the movement — Its philosophy — ^The value of 
hand training in the development of the brain and its sig- 
nificance in the making of man — A grammar of our many 
industries hard — The best we do can reach but few — Very 
great defects in our manual training methods which do not 
base on science and make nothing salable — The Leipzig 
system — Sloyd is hypermethodic — These crude peasant in- 
dustries can never satisfy educational needs — The gospel of 
work; William Morris and the arts and crafts movement — 
Its spirit desirable — ^The magic effects of a brief period of 
intense work — The natural development of the drawing 
instinct in the child 35 

V. — Gymnastics. 

The story of Jahn and the Turners — ^The enthusiasm which 
this movement generated in Germany — ^The ideal of bringing 
out latent powers — ^The concept of more perfect voluntary 
control — Swedish gymnastics — Doing everything possible 
for the body as a machine — Liberal physical culture — Ling's 
orthogenic scheme of economic postures and movements and 
correcting defects — The ideal of symmetry and prescribing 
exercises to bring the body to a standard — Lamentable lack 
of correlation between these four systems — Illustrations of 
the great good that a systematic training can effect — 
Athletic records — Greek physical training .... 53 

VI. — Play, Sports, and Games. 

The view of Groos partial, and a better explanation of play 
proposed as rehearsing ancestral activities — The glory of 
Greek physical training, its ideals and results — The first 
spontaneous movements of infancy as keys to the past — 
Necessity of developing basal powers before those that are 
later and peculiar to the individual — Plays that interest due 
to their antiquity — Play with dolls — Play distinguished by 
age — Play preferences of children and their reasons — The 
profound significance of rhythm — The value of dancing and 
also its significance, history, and the desirability of rein- 
troducing it — Fighting — Boxing — Wrestling — Bushido — 
viii 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Foot-ball — Military ideals — Showing off — Cold baths — Hill 
climbing — The playground movement — The psychology of 
play — Its relation to work 73 

VII. — Faults, Lies, and Crimes. 

Classification of children's faults — Peculiar children — Real 
faults as distinguished from interference with the teacher's 
ease — Truancy, its nature and effects — The genesis of crime 
— The lie, its classes and relations to imagination — Preda- 
tory activities — Gangs — Causes of crime — The effects of / 
stories of crime — ^Temibility — Juvenile crime and its treat- 
ment 120 

VIII. — Biographies of Youth. 

Knightly ideals and honor — Thirty adolescents from 
Shakespeare — Goethe — C. D. Warner — Aldrich — The fugi- 
tive nature of adolescent experience— Extravagance of 
autobiographies — Stories that attach to great names — Some 
typical crazes — Illustrations from George Eliot, Edison, 
Chatterton, Hawthorne, Whittier, Spencer, Huxley, Lyell, 
Byron, Heine, Napoleon, Darwin, Martineau, Agassiz, 
Madame Roland, Louisa Alcott, F. H. Burnett, Helen Keller, 
Marie Bashkirtseff, Mary MacLane, Ada Negri, De Quincey, 
Stuart Mill, Jefferies, and scores of others .... 141 

IX. — The Growth of Social Ideals. 

Change from childish to adult friends — Influence of favorite 
teachers — What children wish or plan to do or be — Property 
and the money sense — Social judgments — The only child — 
First social organizations — Student life — Associations for 
youth controlled by adults 207 

X. — Intellectual Education and School Work. 

The general change and plasticity at puberty — English 
teaching — Causes of its failure, (1) too much time to other 
languages, (2) subordination of literary content to form, 
(3) too early stress on eye and hand instead of ear and 
mouth, (4) excessive use of concrete words — Children's 
interest in words — Their favorites — Slang — Story telling — 
Age of reading crazes — What to read — ^The historic sense — 

Growth of memory span 234 

ix 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XL — The Education of Girls. 

Equal opportunities of higher education now open — Brings 
new dangers to women — Ineradicable sex differences begin 
at puberty, when the sexes should and do diverge — Different 
interests — Sex tension — Girls more mature than boys at the 
same age — Radical psychic and physiological differences 
between the sexes — The bachelor women — Needed recon- 
struction — Food — Sleep — Regimen — Manners — Religion — 
Regularity — The topics for a girls' curriculum — The eter- 
nally womanly 277 

XII. — Moral and Religious Training. 

Dangers of muscular degeneration and overstimulus of 
brain — Difficulties in teaching morals — Methods in Europe 
— Obedience to commands — Good habits should be mechan- 
ized — Value of scolding — How to flog aright — Its dangers — 
Moral precepts and proverbs — Habituation — Training will 
through intellect — Examinations — Concentration — Origi- 
^ nality — Froebel and the naive — First ideas of God — Con- 
science — Importance of Old and New Testaments — Sex 
dangers — Love and religion — Conversion , . . . 324 



YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, 
AND HYGIENE 



CHAPTER I 

PRE-ADOLESCENCE 

Introduction: Characterization of the age from eight to twelve — The 
era of recapitulating the stages of primitive human development — 
Life close to nature — The age also for drill, habitviation, memory- 
work, and regermination — Adolescence superposed upon this stage 
of life, but very distinct from it. 

The years from about eight to twelve constitute a 
unique period of human life. The acute stage of teeth- 
ing is passing, the brain has acquired nearly its adult size 
and weight, health is almost at its best, activity is greater 
and more varied than it ever "vvas before or ever will be 
again, and there is peculiar endurance, vitality, and re- 
sistance to fatigue. The child develops a life of its own 
outside the home circle, and its natural interests are 
never so independent of adult influence. Perception is 
very acute, and there is great immunity to exposure, 
danger, accident, as well as to temptation. Reason, true 
morality, religion, sympathy, love, and esthetic enjoy- 
ment are but very slightly developed. 

Everything, in short, suggests that this period may 
represent in the individual what was once for a very 
protracted and relatively stationary period an age of 
maturity in the remote ancestors of our race, when the 
young of our species, who were perhaps pygmoid, shifted 

1 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

for themselves independently of further parental aid. 
The qualities developed during pre-adolescence are, in 
the evolutionary history of the race, far older than hered- 
itary traits of body and mind which develop later and 
which may be compared to a new and higher story built 
upon our primal nature. Heredity is so far both more 
stable and more secure. The elements of personality are 
few, but are well organized on a simple, effective plan. 
The momentum of these traits inherited from our indefi- 
nitely remote ancestors is great, and they are often 
clearly distinguishable from those to be added later. 
Thus the boy is father of the man in a new sense, in that 
his qualities are indefinitely older and existed, well com- 
pacted, untold ages before the more distinctly human 
attributes were developed. Indeed there are a few faint 
indications of an earlier age node, at about the age of six, 
as if amid the instabilities of health we could detect signs 
that this may have beerf the age of puberty in remote ages 
of the past. I have also given reasons that lead me to the 
conclusion that, despite its dominance, the function of 
sexual maturity and procreative power is peculiarly 
mobile up and down the age-line independently of many 
of the qualities usually so closely associated with it, so 
that much that sex created in the phylum now precedes 
it in the individual. 

Rousseau would leave prepubescent years to nature 
and to these primal hereditary impulsions and allow the 
fundamental traits of savagery their fling till twelve. 
Biological psychology finds many and cogent rea- 
sons to confirm this view if only a proper environ- 
ment could he provided. The child revels in savagery; 
and if its tribal, predatory, hunting, fishing, fighting, 
roving, idle, playing proclivities could be indulged in the 
country and under conditions that now, alas ! seem hope- 

2 



PRE-ADOLESCEXCE 

lessly ideal, they could conceivably be so organized and 
directed as to be far more truly humanistic and liberal 
than all that the best modern school can provide. Rudi- 
mentary organs of the soul, now suppressed, perverted, or 
delayed, to crop out in menacing forms later, would be de- 
veloped in their season so that we should be immune to 
them in maturer years, on the principle of the Aristote- 
lian catharsis for which I have tried to suggest a 
far broader application than the Stagirite could see 
in his day. 

These inborn and more or less savage instincts can 
and should be allowed some scope. The deep and strong 
cravings in the individual for those primitive experiences 
and occupations in which his ancestors became skilful 
through the pressure of necessity should not be ignored, 
but can and should be, at least partially, satisfied in a 
vicarious way, by tales from literature, history, and 
tradition which present the crude and primitive virtues 
of the heroes of the world's childhood. In this way, aided 
by his vivid visual imagination, the child may enter upon 
his heritage from the past, live out each stage of life to 
its fullest and realize in himself all its manifold ten- 
dencies. ' Echoes only of the vaster, richer life of the 
remote past of the race they must remain, but just these 
are the murmurings of the only muse that can save from 
the omnipresent dangers of precocity. Thus we not only 
rescue from the danger of loss, but utilize for further 
psychic growth the results of the higher heredity, which 
are the most precious and potential things on earth. 
So, too, in our urbanized hothouse life, that tends to 
ripen everything before its time, we must teach nature, 
although the very phrase is ominous. But we must not, 
in so doing, wean still more from, but perpetually incite 
to visit, field, forest, hill, shore, the water, flowers, 

3 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, RJ IGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

animals, the true homes of childhood in this wild, un- 
domesticated stage from which modern conditions have 
kidnapped and transported him. Books and reading 
are distasteful, for the very soul and body cry out for a 
more active, objective life, and to know nature and man 
at first hand. These two staples, stories and nature, by 
these informal methods of the home and the environ- 
ment, constitute fundamental education. 

But now another remove from nature seems to be 
made necessary by the manifold knowledges and skills 
of our highly complex civilization. We should trans- 
plant the human sapling, I concede reluctantly, as early 
as eight, but not before, to the schoolhouse with its im- 
perfect lighting, ventilation, temperature. We must 
shut out nature and open books. The child must sit on 
unhygienic benches and work the tiny muscles that wag 
the tongue and pen, and let all the others, which consti- 
tute nearly half its weight, decay. Even if it be pre- 
maturely, he must be subjected to special disciplines and 
be apprenticed to the higher qualities of adulthood ; for 
he is not only a product of nature, but a candidate for a 
highly developed humanity. To many, if not most, of 
the influences here there can be at first but little inner 
response. Insight, understanding, interest, sentiment, 
are for the most part only nascent; and most that per- 
tains to the true kingdom of mature manhood is em- 
bryonic. The wisest requirements seem to the child more 
or less alien, arbitrary, heteronomous, artificial, falsetto. 
There is much passivity, often active resistance and 
evasion, and perhaps spasms of obstinacy, to it all. But 
the senses are keen and alert, reactions immediate and 
vigorous ; and the memory is quick, sure and lasting ; and 
ideas of space, time, and physical causation, and of many 
a moral and social licit and non-licit, are rapidly unfold- 

4 



PRE-ADOLESCENCE 

mg. Never again will there be such susceptibility to 
drill and discipline, such plasticity to habituation, or such 
ready adjustment to new conditions. It is the age of 
external and mechanical training. Reading, writing, 
dr-awing, manual training, musical technic, foreign 
tongues and their pronunciation, the manipulation of 
numbers and of geometrical elements, and many kinds of 
skill have now their golden hour; and if it passes unim- 
proved, all these can never be acquired later without a 
heavy handicap of disadvantage and loss. These necessi- 
ties may be hard for the health of body, sense, mind, as 
well as for morals ; and pedagogic art consists in breaking 
the child into them betimes as intensely and as quickly as 
possible with minimal strain and with the least amount 
of explanation or coquetting for natural interest, and in 
calling medicine confectionery. This is not teaching in 
its true sense so much as it is drill, inculcation, and 
regimentation. The method should be mechanical, re- 
petitive, authoritative, dogmatic. The automatic powers 
are now at their very apex, and they can do and 
bear more than our degenerate pedagogy knows or 
dreams of. Here we have something to learn from the 
schoolmasters of the past back to the middle ages, and 
even from the ancients. The greatest stress, with short 
periods and few hours, incessant insistence, incitement, 
and little reliance upon interest, reason, or work done 
without the presence of the teacher, should be the guid- 
ing principles for pressure in these essentially formal 
and, to the child, contentless elements of knowledge. 
These should be sharply distinguished from the in- 
digenous, evoking, and more truly educational factors 
described in the last paragraph, which are meaty, con- 
tent-full, and relatively formless as to time of day, 
method, spirit, and perhaps environment and personnel 

5 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

of teacher, 'and possibly somewhat in season of the year, 
almost as sharply as work differs from play, or perhaps 
as the virility of man that loves to command a phalanx, 
be a martinet and drill-master, differs from femininity 
which excels in persuasion, sympathetic insight, story- 
telling, and in the tact that discerns and utilizes spon- 
taneous interests in the young. 

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more 
completely human traits are now born. The qualities of 
body and soul that now emerge are far newer. The child 
comes from and harks back to a remoter past ; the adoles- 
cent is neo-atavistic, and in him the later acquisitions of 
the race slowly become prepotent. Development is less 
gradual and more saltatory, suggestive of some ancient 
period of storm and stress when old moorings were 
broken and a higher level attained. The annual rate of 
growth in height, weight, and strength is increased and 
often doubled, and even more. Important functions, 
previously non-existent, arise. Growth of parts and or- 
gans loses its former proportions, some permanently and 
some for a season. Some of these are still growing in 
old age and others are soon arrested and atrophy. The 
old measures of dimensions become obsolete, and old har- 
monies are broken. The range of individual differences 
and average errors in all physical measurements and all 
psychic tests increases. Some linger long in the childish 
stage and advance late or slowly, while others push on 
with a sudden outburst of impulsion to early maturity. 
Bones and muscles lead all other tissues, as if they vied 
with each other; and there is frequent flabbiness or ten- 
sion as one or the other leads. Nature arms youth for 
conflict with all the resources at her command — speed, 
power of shoulder, biceps, back, leg, jaw — strengthens 
and enlarges skull, thorax, hips, makes man aggressive 
and prepares woman's frame for maternity. 

6 



CHAPTER II 

THE MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL 

Muscles as organs of the will, of character, and even of thought — The 
muscular virtues — Fundamental and accessory muscles and functions 
— The development of the mind and of the upright position — Small 
muscles as organs of thought — School lays too much stress upon these 
— Chorea — Vast numbers of automatic movements in children — Great 
variety of spontaneous activities — Poise, control and spurtiness — Pen 
and tongue wagging — Sedentary school life vs. free out-of-door activ- 
ities — Modern decay of muscles, especially in girls — Plasticity of 
motor habits at puberty. 

The muscles are by weight about forty-three per cent 
of the average adult male human body. They expend a 
large fraction of all the kinetic energy of the adult body, 
which a recent estimate places as high as one-fifth. The 
cortical centers for the voluntary muscles extend over 
most of the lateral psychic zones of the brain, so that 
their culture is brain building. In a sense they are 
organs of digestion, for which function they play a very 
important role. IMuscles are in a most intimate and 
peculiar sense the organs of the will. They have built all 
the roads, cities, and machines in the world, written all 
the books, spoken all the words, and, in fact, done every- 
thing that man has accomplished with matter. If they 
are undeveloped or grow relaxed and flabby, the dread- 
ful chasm between good intentions and their execution 
is liable to appear and widen. Character might be in a 
sense defined as a plexus of motor habits. To call con- 
duct three-fourths of life, with ]\Iatthew Arnold ; to de- 
scribe man as one-third intellect and two-thirds will, with 
2 7 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENI 

Schopenhauer; to urge that man is what he does or th -i 
he is the sum of his movements, with F. W. Robertso: 
that character is simply muscle habits, with Maudsle; 
that the age of art is now slowly superseding the age oi 
science, and that the artist will drive out with the pro- 
fessor, with the anonymous author of " Rembrandt als 
Erzieher"^; that history is consciously willed move- 
ments, with Bluntschli; or that we could form no con- 
ception of force or energy in the world but for our own 
muscular effort; to hold that most thought involves 
change of muscle tension as more or less integral to it — 
all this shows how Vve have modified the antique Cice- 
ronian conception vivere est cogitari,^ to vivere est velle,^ 
and gives us a new sense of the importance of muscular 
development and regimen.* 

Modern psychology thus sees in muscles organs of 
expression for all efferent processes. Beyond all their 
demonstrable functions, every change of attention and of 
psychic states generally plays upon them unconsciously, 
modifying their tension in subtle ways so that they may 
be called organs of thought and feeling as well as of will, 
in which some now see the true Kantian thing-in-itself 
the real substance of the world, in the anthropomor- 
phism of force. Habits even determine the deeper strata 
of belief; thought is repressed action; and deeds, not 
words, are the language of complete men. The motor 
areas are closely related and largely identical with the 
psychic, and muscle culture develops brain-centers as 
nothing else yet demonstrably does. Muscles are the 
vehicles of habituation, imitation, obedience, character, 
and even of manners and customs. For the young, 
motor education is cardinal, and is now coming to due 

1 Dieterich. Gottingen, 1886. 2 To live is to think. 

3 To live is to will. See Chap. xii. 

8 



MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL 

recognition; and, for all, education is incomplete without 
a motor side. Skill, endurance, and perseverance may 
almost be called muscular virtues; and fatigue, velleity, 
caprice, ennui, restlessness, lack of control and poise, 
muscular faults. 

To understand the momentous changes of motor 
functions that characterize adolescence we must con- 
sider other than the measurable aspects of the subject. 
Perhaps the best scale on which to measure all normal 
growth of muscle structure and functions is found in the 
progress from fundamental to accessory. The former 
designates the muscles and movements of the trunk and 
large joints, neck, back, hips, shoulders, knees, and 
elbows, sometimes called central, and which in general 
man has in common with the higher and larger animals. 
Their activities are few, mostly simultaneous, alternating 
and rhythmic, as of the legs in walking, and predomi- 
nate in hard-working men and women with little culture 
or intelligence, and often in idiots. The latter or acces- 
sory movements are those of the hand, tongue, face, 
and articulatory organs, and these may be connected into 
a long and greatly diversified series, as those used in 
writing, talking, piano-playing. They are represented 
by smaller and more numerous muscles, whose functions 
develop later in life and represent a higher standpoint 
of evolution. These smaller muscles for finer move- 
ments come into function later and are chiefly associated 
with psychic activity, which plays upon them by inces- 
santly changing their tensions, if not causing actual 
movement. It is these that are so liable to disorder in 
the many automatisms and choreic tics we see in school 
children, especially if excited or fatigued. General 
paralysis usually begins in the higher levels by breaking 
these down, so that the first symptom of its insidious and 

9 



V 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

never interrupted progress is inability to execute the 
more exact and delicate movements of tongue or hand, 
or both. Starting with the latest evolutionary level, it 
is a devolution that may work downward till very many 
of the fundamental activities are lost before death. 

Nothing better illustrates this distinction than the 
difference between the fore foot of animals and the hu- 
man hand. The first begins as a fin or paddle or is armed 
with a hoof, and is used solely for locomotion. Some 
carnivora with claws use the fore limb also for holding 
as well as tearing, and others for digging. Arboreal life 
seems to have almost created the simian hand and to have 
wrought a revolution in the form and use of the forearm 
and its accessory organs, the fingers. Apes and other 
tree-climbing creatures must not only adjust their pre- 
hensile organ to a wide variety of distances and sizes of 
branches, but must use the hands more or less freely for 
picking, transporting, and eating fruit; and this has 
probably been a prime factor in lifting man to the erect 
position, without which human intelligence as we know 
it could have hardly been possible. ' ' When we attempt 
to measure the gap between man and the lower animals 
in terms of the form of movement, the wonder is no less 
great than when we use the term of mentality." ^ The 
degree of approximation to human intelligence in anthro- 
poid animals follows very closely the degree of approxi- 
mation to human movements. 

The gradual acquirement of the erect position by the 
human infant admirably repeats this long phylogenetic 
evolution.^ At first the limbs are of almost no use in 



1 F. Burk in From Fundamental to Accessory. Pedagogical Semi- 
nary, Oct., 1898, vol. 6, pp. 5-64. 

2 Creeping and Walking, by A. W. Trettien. American Journal of 
Psychology, October, 1900, vol. 12, pp. 1-57. 

10 



MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL 

locomotion, but the fundamental trunk muscles with 
those that move the large joints are more or less spas- 
modically active. Then comes creeping, with use of the 
hip muscles, while all below the knee is useless, as also 
are the fingers. Slowly the leg and foot are degraded to 
locomotion, slowly the great toe becomes more limited in 
its action, the thumb increases in flexibility and 
strength of opposition, and the fingers grow more mobile 
and controllable. As the body slowly assumes the verti- 
cal attitude, the form of the chest changes till its greatest 
diameter is transverse instead of from front to back. 
The shoulder-blades are less parallel than in quadrupeds, 
and spread out till they approximate the same plane. 
This gives the arm freedom of movement laterally, so 
that it can be rotated one hundred and eighty degrees in 
man as contrasted to one hundred degrees in apes, thus 
giving man the command of almost any point within 
a sphere of which the two arms are radii. The power 
of grasping was partly developed from and partly added 
to the old locomotor function of the fore limbs ; the jerky 
aimless automatisms, as well as the slow rhythmic flexion 
and extension of the fingers and hand, movements which 
are perhaps survivals of arboreal or of even earlier 
aquatic life, are coordinated; and the bilateral and si- 
multaneous rhythmic movements of the heavier muscles 
are supplemented by the more finely adjusted and spe- 
cialized activities which as the end of the growth period 
is approached are detci-mined less by heredity and 
more by environment. In a sense, a child or a man is the 
sum total of his movements or tendencies to move; and 
nature and instinct chiefly determine the basal, and edu- 
cation the accessory parts of our activities. 

The entire accessory system is thus of vital impor- 
tance for the development of all of the arts of expression. 

11 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

These smaller muscles might almost be called organs of 
thought. Their tension is modified with the faintest 
change of soul, such as is seen in accent, inflection, facial 
expressions, handwriting, and many forms of so-called 
mind-reading, which, in fact, is always muscle-reading. 
The day-laborer of low intelligence, with a practical 
vocabulary of not over five hundred words, who can 
hardly move each of his fingers without moving others 
or all of them, who can not move his brows or corrugate 
his forehead at will, and whose inflection is very monoto- 
nous, illustrates a condition of arrest or atrophy of this 
later, finer, accessory system of muscles. On the other 
hand, the child, precocious in any or all of these later 
respects, is very liable to be undeveloped in the larger 
and more fundamental parts and functions. The full 
unfoldment of each is, in fact, an inexorable condition 
precedent for the normal development to full and abid- 
ing maturity of the higher and more refined muscularity, 
just as conversely the awkwardness and clumsiness of 
adolescence mark a temporary loss of balance in the 
opposite direction. If this general conception be correct, 
then nature does not finish the basis of her pyramid in 
the way Ross, Mercier, and others have assumed, but 
lays a part of the foundation and, after carrying it to 
an apex, normally goes back and adds to the foundation 
to carry up the apex still higher and, if prevented from 
so doing, expends her energy in building the apex up at a 
sharper angle till instability results. School and kinder- ■ 
garten often lay a disproportionate strain on the tiny ac- 
cessory muscles, weighing altogether but a few ounces, 
that wag the tongue, move the pen, and do fine work re- 
quiring accuracy. But still at this stage prolonged work 
requiring great accuracy is irksome and brings dangers 
homologous to those caused by too much fine work in the 

12 



7 

/ 



MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL 

kindergarten before the first adjustment of large to 
small muscles, which lasts until adolescence, is estab- 
lished. Then disproportion between function and 
growth often causes symptoms of chorea. The chief 
danger is arrest of the development and control of the 
smaller muscles. Many occupations and forms of athlet- 
ics, on the contrary, place the stress mainly upon groups 
of fundamental muscles to the neglect of finer motor pos- 
sibilities. Some who excel in heavy athletics no doubt 
coarsen their motor reactions, become not only inexact 
and heavy but unresponsive to finer stimuli, as if the 
large muscles were hypertrophied and the small ones ar- 
rested. On the other hand, many young men, and prob- 
ably more young women, expend too little of their avail- 
able active energy upon basal and massive muscle work, 
and cultivate too much, and above all too early, the 
delicate responsive work. This is, perhaps, the best 
physiological characterization of precocity and issues in 
excessive nervous and muscular irritability. The great 
influx of muscular vigor that unfolds during adolescent 
years and which was originally not only necessary to suc- 
cessful propagation, but expressive of virility, seems 
to be a very plastic quantity, so that motor regimen and 
exercise at this stage is probably more important and 
all-conditioning for mentality, sexuality, and health than 
at any other period of life. Intensity, and for a time a 
spurty diathesis, is as instinctive and desirable as are the 
copious minor automatisms which spontaneously give the 
alphabet out of which complex and finer motor series are 
later spelled by the conscious will. Mercier and others 
have pointed out that, as most skilled labor, so school 
work and modern activities in civilized life generally lay 
premature and disproportionate strains upon those kinds 
of movement requiring exactness. Stress upon basal 

13 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATIOxN, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

movements is not only compensating but is of higher 
therapeutic value against the disorders of the accessory 
system; it constitutes the best cure or prophylactic for 
fidgets and tense states, and directly develops poise, con- 
trol, and psycho-physical equilibrium. Even when con- 
tractions reach choreic intensity the best treatment is to 
throw activities down the scale that measures the differ- 
ence between primary and secondary movements and 
to make the former predominate. 

The number of movements, the frequency with which 
they are repeated, their diversity, the number of combi- 
nations, and their total kinetic quantum in young chil- 
dren, whether we consider movements of the body as a 
whole, fundamental movements of large limbs, or finer 
accessory motions, is amazing. Nearly every external 
stimulus is answered by a motor response. Dresslar ^ ob- 
served a thirteen months' old baby for four hours, and 
found, to follow Preyer's classification, impulsive or 
spontaneous, reflex, instinctive, imitative, inhibitive, ex- 
pressive, and even deliberative movements, with marked 
satisfaction in rhythm, attempts to do almost anything 
which appealed to him, and almost inexhaustible efferent 
resources. A friend has tried to record every word ut- 
tered by a four-year-old girl during a portion of a day, 
and finds nothing less than verbigerations. A teacher 
noted the activities of a fourteen-year-old boy during the 
study time of a single school day,^ with similar results. 

Lindley ' studied 897 common motor automatisms in 
children, which he divided into 92 classes: 45 in the re- 

1 A Morning Observation of a Baby. Pedagogical Seminary, Decem- 
ber, 1901, vol. 8, pp. 469-481. 

2 Kate Carman. Notes on School Activity. Pedagogical Seminary, 
March, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 106-117. 

3 A Preliminary Study of Some of the Motor Phenomena of Mental 
Effort. American Journal of Psychology, July, 1896, vol. 7, pp. 491-517. 

14 



MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL 

gion of the head, 20 in the feet and legs, 19 in the hands 
and fingers. Arranged in the order of frequency with 
which each was found, the list stood as follows : fingers, 
feet, lips, tongue, head, body, hands, mouth, eyes, jaws, 
legs, forehead, face, arms, ears. In the last five alone 
adolescents exceeded children, the latter excelling the 
former most in those of head, mouth, legs, and tongue, 
in this order. The writer believes that there are many 
more automatisms than appeared in his returns. 

School life, especially in the lower grades, is a rich 
field for the study of these activities. They are familiar, 
as licking things, clicking with the tongue, grinding the 
teeth, scratching, tapping, twirling a lock of hair or 
chewing it, biting the nails (Berillon's onychophagia), 
shrugging, corrugating, pulling buttons or twisting 
garments, strings, etc., twirling pencils, thumbs, rotat- 
ing, nodding and shaking the head, squinting and wink- 
ing, swaying, pouting and grimacing, scraping the floor, 
rubbing hands, stroking, patting, flicking the fingers, 
wagging, snapping the fingers, snuffling, squinting, pick- 
ing the face, interlacing the fingers, cracking the joints, 
finger plays, biting and nibbling, trotting the leg, suck- 
ing things, etc. 

The average number of automatisms per 100 persons 
Smith found to be in children 176, in adolescents 110. 
Swaying is chiefly with children ; playing and drumming 
with the fingers is more common among adolescents ; the 
movements of fingers and feet decline little with age, and 
those of eyes and forehead increase, which is significant 
for the development of attention. Girls excel greatly in 
swaying, and also, although less, in finger automatism; 
and boys lead in movements of tongue, feet, and hands. 
Such movements increase, with too much sitting, inten- 
sity of effort, such as to fix attention, and vary with the 

15 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

nature of the activity willed, but involve few muscles 
directly used in a given task. They increase up the 
kindergarten grades and fall off rapidly in the primary 
grades; are greater with'tasks requiring fine and exact 
movements than with those involving large movements. 
Automatisms are often a sign of the difficulty of tasks. 
The restlessness that they often express is one of the com- 
monest signs of fatigue. They are mostly in the acces- 
sory muscles, while those of the fundamental muscles 
(body, legs, and arms) disappear rapidly with age; 
those of eye, brow, and jaw show greatest increase with 
age, but their frequency in general declines with growing 
maturity, although there is increased frequency of cer- 
tain specialized contractions, which indicate the gradual 
settling of expression in the face. 

Often such movements pass over by insensible grada- 
tion into the morbid automatism of chorea, and in yet 
lower levels of decay we see them in the aimless picking 
and plucking movements of the fingers of the sick. In 
idiots ^ arrest of higher powers often goes with hyper- 
trophy of these movements, as seen in head-beaters (as 
if, just as nature impels those partially blind to rub the 
eyes for " light-hunger," so it prompts the feeble- 
minded to strike the head for cerebrations), rockers, 
rackers, shakers, biters, etc. Movements often pass to 
fixed attitudes and postures of limbs or body, disturbing 
the normal balance between flexors and extensors, the 
significance of which as nerve signs or exponents of 
habitual brain states and tensions Warner has so admir- 
ably shown. 

Abundance and vigor of automatic movements are 
desirable, and even a considerable degree of restlessness 

1 G. E. Johnson. Psychology and Pedagogy of Feeble-Minded 
Children. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1895, vol. 3, pp. 246-301. 

16 



MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL 

is a good sign in young children. ]Many of what are 
now often called nerve signs and even choreic symp- 
toms, the fidgetiness in school on cloudy days and often 
after a vacation, the motor superfluities of awkwardness, 
embarrassment, extreme effort, excitement, fatigue, 
sleepiness, etc., are simply the forms in which we re- 
ceive the full momentum of heredity and mark a 
natural richness of the raw material of intellect, feel- 
ing, and especially of will. Hence they must be abun- 
dant. All parts should act in all possible w^ays at first 
and untrammeled by the activity of all other parts and 
functions. Some of these activities are more essential 
for growth in size than are later and more conscious 
movements. Here as everywhere the rule holds that 
powers themselves must be unfolded before the ability 
to check or even to use them can develop. All move- 
ments arising from spontaneous activity of nerve cells 
or centers must be made in order even to avoid the 
atrophy of disease. Not only so, but this purer kind 
of innateness must often be helped out to some extent 
in some children by stimulating reflexes ; a rich and wdde 
repertory of sensation must be made familiar; more or 
less and very guarded, watched and limited experiences 
of hunger, thirst, cold, heat, tastes, sounds, smells, 
colors, brightnesses, tactile irritations, and perhaps even 
occasional tickling and pain to play off the vastly com- 
plex function of laughing, crying, etc., may in some 
cases be judicious. Conscious and unconscious imita- 
tion or repetition of every sort of copy may also help 
to establish the immediate and low-level connection be- 
tween afferent and efferent processes that brings the 
organism into direct rapport and harmony with the 
whole world of sense. Perhaps the more rankly and in- 
dependently they are developed to full functional in- 

17 



Syy 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

j tegrity, each in its season, if we only knew that sea- 
vi son, the better. Premature control by higher centers, 
or coordination into higher compounds of habits and 
ordered serial activities, is repressive and wasteful, and 
the mature will of which they are components, or which 
must at least domesticate them, is stronger and more 
forcible if this serial stage is not unduly abridged. 
/ But, secondly, many, if not most, of these activities 

^|when developed a little, group after group, as they arise, 
must be controlled, checked, and organized into higher 
and often more serial compounds. The inhibiting func- 
tions are at first hard. In trying to sit still the child 
sets its teeth, holds the breath, clenches its fists and per- 
haps makes every muscle tense with a great effort that 
very soon exhausts. This repressive function is prob- 
ably not worked from special nervous centers, nor can 
we speak with confidence of collisions with " sums 
of arrest " in a sense analogous to that of Herbart, or 
of stimuli that normally cause catabolic molecular proc- 
esses in the cells, being mysteriously diverted to pro- 
duce increased instability or anabolic lability in the 
sense of Wundt's Mechanik der N erven. 'The concept 
now suggested by many facts is that inhibition is irradi- 
ation or long circuiting to higher and more complex 
brain areas, so that the energy, whether spontaneous or 
reflex, is diverted to be used elsewhere. These combina- 
tions are of a higher order, more remote from reflex 
action, and modified by some Jacksonian third level. ^ 

1 Dr. Hughlings Jackson, the eminent English pathologist, was the 
first to make practical application of the evolutionary theory of the 
nervous system to the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsies and mental 
diseases. The practical success of this application was so great that the 
Hughlings-Jackson "three-level theory" is now the established basis of 
English diagnosis. He conceived the nervous mechanism as composed 
of three systems, arranged in the form of a hierarchy, the higher including 

18 



MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL 

Action is now not from independent centers, but these 
are slowly associated, so that excitation may flow off 
from one point to any other and any reaction may re- 
sult from any stimulus. 

The more unified the brain the less it suffers from 
localization, and the lower is the level to which any one 
function can exhaust the whole. The tendency of each 
group of cells to discharge or overflow into those of 
lower tension than themselves increases as correspond- 
ence in time and space widens. The more one of a 
number of activities gains in power to draw on all the 
brain, or the more readily the active parts are fed at cost 
of the resting parts, the less is rest to be found in 
change from one of these activities to another, and the 
less do concentration and specialization prove to be dan- 
gerous. Before, the aim was to wake all parts to func- 

the lower, and yet each having a certain degree of independence. The 
first level represents the type of simplest reflex and involuntary move- 
ment and is localized in the gray matter of the spinal cord, medulla, and 
pons. The second, or middle level, comprises those structures which 
receive sensory impulses from the cells of the lowest level instead of 
directly from the periphery or the non-nervous tissues. The motor cells 
of this middle level also discharge into the motor mechanisms of the 
lowest level. Jackson located these middle level structures in the cortex 
of the central convolutions, the basal ganglia and the centers of the 
special senses in the cortex. The highest level bears the same relation 
to the middle level that it bears to the lowest i.e., no continuous connec- 
tion between the highest and the lowest level is assumed; the structures 
of the middle level mediate between them as a system of relays. Accord- 
ing to this hierarchical arrangement of the nervous system, the lowest 
level which is the simplest and oldest "contains the mechanism for the 
simple fundamental movements in reflexes and involuntary reactions. 
The second level regroups these simple movements by combinations and 
associations of cortical structures in wider, more complex mechanisms, 
producing a higher class of movements. The highest level unifies the 
whole nervous system and, according to Jackson, is the anatomical basis 
of mind." 

For a fuller account of this theory see Burk : From Fundamental to 
Accessory in the Nervous System and of Movements. Pedagogical 
Seminary, October, 1898, vol. 6, pp. 17-23. 

19 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

tion ; now it is to connect them. Intensity of this cross- 
section activity now tends to unity, so that all parts of 
the brain energize together. In a brain with this switch- 
board function well organized, each reaction has grown 
independent of its own stimulus and may result from 
any stimulation, and each act, e. g., a finger movement 
of a peculiar nature, may tire the whole brain. This 
helps us to understand why brain-workers so often excel 
laborers not only in sudden dynamometric strength test, 
but in sustained and long-enduring effort. In a good 
brain or in a good machine, power may thus be de- 
veloped over a large surface, and all of it applied to a 
small one, and hence the dangers of specialization are 
lessened in exact proportion as the elements of our ego 
are thus compacted together. It is in the variety and 
delicacy of these combinations and all that they imply, 
far more than in the elements of which they are com- 
posed, that man rises farthest above the higher animals ; 
and of these powers later adolescence is the golden age. 
The aimless and archaic movements of infancy, whether 
massive and complex or in the form of isolated auto- 
matic tweaks or twinges, are thus, by slow processes of 
combined analysis and synthesis, involving changes as 
radical as any in all the world of growth, made over 
into habits and conduct that fit the world of present 
environment. 

But, thirdly, this long process carried out with all 
degrees of completeness may be arrested at any unfin- 
ished stage. Some automatisms refuse to be controlled 
by the will, and both they and it are often overworked. 
Here we must distinguish constantly between (1) those 
growing rankly in order to be later organized under the 
will, and (2) those that have become feral after this 
domestication of them has lost power from disease or 

20 



MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL 

fatigue, and (3) those that have never been subju- 
gated because the central power that should have 
used them to weave the texture of willed action 
— the proper language of complete manhood — was 
itself arrested or degenerate. With regard to many 
of these movements these distinctions can be made 
with confidence, and in some children more cer- 
tainly than in others. In childhood, before twelve, 
the efferent patterns should be developed into many i 
more or less indelible habits, and their colors set fast. !/ 
Motor specialties requiring exactness and grace like 
piano-playing, drawing, writing, pronunciation of a 
foreign tongue, dancing, acting, singing, and a host of 
virtuosities, must be well begun before the relative ar- 
rest of accessory growth at the dawn of the ephebic 
regeneration and before its great afflux of strength. 
The facts seem to show that children of this age, such as 
Hancock ^ described, who could not stand with feet close 
together and eyes closed without swaying much, could 
not walk backward, sit still half a minute, dress alone, 
tie two ends of a string together, interlace slats, wind 
thread, spin a top, stand on toes or heels, hop on each 
foot, drive a nail, roll a hoop, skate, hit fingers together 
rapidly in succession beginning at the little finger and 
then reversing, etc., are the very ones in whom autom- 
atisms are most marked or else they are those consti- 
tutionally inert, dull, or uneducable. 

In children these motor residua may persist as char- 
acteristic features of inflection, accent, or manners; 
automatisms may become morbid in stammering or stut- 
tering, or they may be seen in gait, handwriting, tics 



» A Preliminary Study of Some of the Motor Phenomena of Mental 
Effort. American Journal of Psychology, July, 1896, vol. 7, pp. 491- 
517. 

21 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

or tweaks, etc. Instead of disappearing with age, as 
they should, they are seen in the blind as facial grimaces 
uncorrected by the mirror or facial consciousness, in the 
deaf as inarticulate noises; and they may tend to grow 
monstrous w^ith age as if they were disintegrated frag- 
ments of our personality, split off and aborted, or motor 
parasites leaving our psycho-physic ego poorer in energy 
and plasticity of adaptation, till the distraction and 
anarchy of the individual nature becomes conspicuous 
and pathetic. 

At puberty, however, when muscle habits are so 
plastic, when there is a new relation between quantity 
or volume of motor energy and qualitative differenti- 
ation, and between volitional control and reflex activi- 
ties, these kinetic remnants strongly tend to shoot to- 
gether into wrong aggregates if right ones are not 
formed. Good manners and correct motor form gener- 
ally, as well as skill, are the most economic ways of doing 
things; but this is the age of wasteful ways, awkward- 
ness, mannerisms, tensions that are a constant leakage 
of vital energy, perhaps semi-imperative acts, con- 
tortions, quaint movements, more elaborated than in 
childhood and often highly unesthetic and disagreeable, 
motor coordinations that will need laborious decomposi^ 
tion later. The avoidable factor in their causation is, 
with some modification, not unlike that of the simpler 
feral movements and faulty attitudes, carriage, and pos- 
tures in children ; viz., some form of overpressure or mis- 
fit between environment and nature. As during the years 
from four to eight there is great danger that over- 
emphasis of the activities of the accessory muscles will 
sow the seeds of chorea, or aggravate predispositions to 
it, now again comes a greatly increased danger, -hardly 
existing from eight to twelve, that overprecision, es- 

22 



MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL 

peeially if fundamental activities are neglected, will 
bring nervous strain and stunting precocity. This is 
again the age of the basal, e. g., hill-climbing muscles, of 
leg and back and shoulder work, and of the yet more 
fundamental heart, lung, and chest muscles. Now again, 
the study of a book, under the usual conditions of sit- 
ting in a closed space and using pen, tongue, and eye 
combined, has a tendency to overstimulate the accessory i / 
muscles. This is especially harmful for city children 
who are too prone to the distraction of overmobility at an 
age especially exposed to maladjustment of motor in- 
come and expenditure; and it constitutes not a liberal 
or power-generating, but a highly and prematurely 
specialized, narrowing, and weakening education unless 
offset by safeguards better than any system of gymnas- 
tics, which is at best artificial and exaggerated. 

As Bryan well says, '^ The efficiency of a machine 
depends so far as we know upon the maximum force, 
rate, amplitude, and variety of direction of its move- 
ments and upon the exactness with which below these 
maxima the force, rate, amplitude, and direction of the 
movements can be controlled." The motor efficiency 
of a man depends upon his ability in all these respects. 
Moreover, the education of the small muscles and fine 
adjustments of larger ones is as near mental training as 
physical culture can get; for these are the thought- \ 
muscles and movements, and their perfected function is ) 
to reflect and express by slight modifications of tension 
and tone every psychic change. Only the brain itself is 
more closely and immediately an organ of thought than 
are these muscles and their activity, reflex, spontaneous, \/ 
or imitative in origin. Whether any of them are of 
value, as Lindley thinks, in arousing the brain to ac- 
tivity, or, as Miiller suggests, in drawing off sensations 
3 23 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

or venting efferent impulses that would otherwise dis- 
tract, we need not here discuss. If so, this is, of course, 
a secondary and late function — nature's way of making 
the best of things and utilizing remnants. 

With these facts and their implications in mind we 
can next pass to consider the conditions under which 
the adolescent muscles best develop. Here we confront 
one of the greatest and most difficult problems of our 
age. Changes in modern motor life have been so vast 
and sudden as to present some of the most comprehen- 
sive and all-conditioning dangers that threaten civilized 
races. Not only have the forms of labor been radically 
changed within a generation or two, but the basal ac- 
tivities that shaped the body of primitive man have 
been suddenly swept away by the new methods of mod- 
ern industry. Even popular sports, games, and recrea- 
tions, so abundant in the early life of all progressive 
peoples, have been reduced and transformed; and the 
play age, that once extended on to middle life and often 
old age, has been restricted. Sedentary life in schools 
and offices, as we have seen, is reducing the vigor and 
size of our lower limbs. Our industry is no longer 
under hygienic conditions; and instead of being out of 
doors, in the country, or of highly diversified kinds, it is 
now specialized, monotonous, carried on in closed spaces, 
bad air, and perhaps poor light, especially in cities. The 
diseases and arrest bred in the young by life in shops, 
offices, factories, and schools increase. Work is rigidly 
bound to fixed hours, uniform standards, stints and 
piece-products; and instead of a finished article, each 
individual now achieves a part of a single process and 
knows little of those that precede or follow. Machinery 
has relieved the large basal muscles and laid more stress 
upon fine and exact movements that involve nerve strain. 

24 



MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL 

The coarser forms of work that involve hard lifting, 
carrying, digging, etc., are themselves specialized, and 
skilled labor requires more and more brain-work. It 
has been estimated that '' the diminution of manual 
labor required to do a given quantity of work in 1884 
as compared with 1870 is no less than 70 per cent. "^ 
Personal interest in and the old native sense of re- 
sponsibility for results, ownership and use of the 
finished products, which have been the inspiration and 
soul of work in all the past, are in more and more fields 
gone. Those who realize how small a proportion of the 
young male population train or even engage in amateur 
sports with zest and regularity, how very few and picked 
men strive for records, and how immediate and amazing 
are the results of judicious training, can best under- 
stand how far below his possibilities as a motor being the 
average modern man goes through life, and how far 
short in this respect he falls from fulfilling nature's 
design for him. 

For unnumbered generations primitive man in the 
nomad age wandered, made perhaps annual migrations, 
and bore hea^^y burdens, while we ride relatively unen- 
cumbered. He tilled the reluctant soil, digging with 
rude implements where we use machines of many man- 
power. In the stone, iron, and bronze age, he shaped 
stone and metals, and wrought with infinite pains and 
effort, products that we buy without even knowledge 
of the processes by which they are made. As hunter he 
followed game, which, when found, he chased, fought, 
and overcame in a struggle perhaps desperate, while 
we shoot it at a distance with little risk or effort. In 
warfare he fought hand to hand and eye to eye, while 
we kill " with as much black powder as can be put in 

1 Encyclopsedia of Social Reform, Funk and Wagnalls, 1896, p. 1095. 

25 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

a woman's thimble." He caught and domesticated 
scores of species of wild animals and taught them to 
serve him; fished with patience and skill that compen- 
sated his crude tools, weapons, implements, and tackle; 
danced to exhaustion in the service of his gods or in 
memory of his forebears, imitating every animal, re- 
hearsing all his own activities in mimic form to the 
point of exhaustion, while we move through a few fig- 
ures in closed spaces. He dressed hides, wove baskets 
which we can not reproduce, and fabrics which we only 
poorly imitate by machinery, made pottery which set 
our fashions, played games that invigorated body and 
soul. His courtship was with feats of prowess and 
skill, and meant physical effort and endurance. 

Adolescent girls, especially in the middle classes, in 
upper grammar and high school grades, during the 
golden age for nascent muscular development, suffer per- 
haps most of all in this respect. Grave as are the evils 
of child labor, I believe far more pubescents in this 
country now suffer from too little than from too much 
physical exercise, while most who suffer from w^ork do 
so because it is too uniform, one-sided, accessory, or per- 
formed under unwholesome conditions, and not because it 
is excessive in amount. Modern industry has thus largely 
ceased to be a means of physical development and needs 
to be offset by compensating modes of activity. Many 
labor-saving devices increase neural strain, so that one of 
the problems of our time is how to preserve and restore 
nerve energy. Under present industrial systems this 
must grow worse and not better in the future. Healthy 
natural industries will be less and less open to the young. 
This is the new situation that now confronts those con- 
cerned for motor education, if they would only make 
good what is lost. 

26 



MUSCLES AND MOTOR PO\YERS IN GENERAL 

Some of the results of these conditions are seen 
in average measurements of dimensions, proportions, 
strength, skill, and control. Despite the excellence of 
the few, the testimony of those most familiar with the 
bodies of children and adults, and their plwsical powers, 
gives evidence of the ravages of modern modes of life 
that, without a wide-spread motor revival, can bode only- 
degeneration for our nation and our race. The number 
of common things that can not be done at all ; the large 
proportion of our youth who must be exempted from 
many kinds of activity or a great amount of any; the 
thin limbs, collapsed shoulders or chests, the bilateral 
asymmetry, weak hearts, lungs, eyes, puny and bad 
voices, muddy or pallid complexions, tired ways, autom- 
atism, dyspeptic stomachs, the effects of youthful error 
or of impoverished heredity, delicate and tender nur- 
ture, often, alas, only too necessary, show the lamentable 
and cumulative effects of long neglect of the motor 
abilities, the most educable of all man's powers; and 
perhaps the most important for his well-being. If the 
unfaithful stewards of these puny and shameful bodies 
had again, as in Sparta, to strip and stand before stern 
judges and render them account, and be smitten with a 
conviction of their weakness, guilty deformity, and ar- 
rest of growth ; if they were brought to realize how they 
are fallen beings, as weak as stern theologians once 
deemed them depraved, and how great their need of 
physical salvation, we might hope again for a physical 
renaissance. Such a rebirth the world has seen but 
twice or perhaps thrice, and each was followed by the 
two or three of the brightest culture periods of history, 
and formed an epoch in the advancement of the kingdom 
of man. A vast body of evidence could be collected from 
the writings of anthropologists showing how superior 

27 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

unspoiled savages are to civilized man in correct or 
esthetic proportions of body, in many forms of endur- 
ance of fatigiie, hardship, and power to bear exposure, 
in the development and preservation of teeth and hair, 
in keenness of senses, absence of deformities, as well as 
immunity to many of our diseases. Their women are 
stronger and bear hardship and exposure, monthly 
periods and childbirth, better. Civilization is so hard 
on the body that some have called it a disease, despite 
the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average 
age, and our greater protection from contagious and 
germ diseases. 

The progressive realization of these tendencies has 
prompted most of the best recent and great changes 
motor-ward in education and also in personal regimen. 
Health- and strength-giving agencies have put to school 
the large motor areas of the brain, so long neglected, and 
have vastly enlarged their scope. Thousands of youth 
are now inspired with new enthusiasm for physical de- 
velopment; and new institutions of many kinds and 
grades have arisen, with a voluminous literature, unnum- 
bered specialists, specialties, new apparatus, tests, move- 
ments, methods, and theories; and the press, the public, 
and the church are awakened to a fresh interest in the 
body and its powers. All this is magnificent, but sadly 
inadequate to cope with the new needs and dangers, 
which are vastly greater. 



28 



CHAPTER III 

INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 

Trade classes and schools, their importance in the international market 
— Our dangers and the superioritj^ of German workmen — The effects 
of a tariff — Description of schools between the kindergarten and the 
industrial school — Equal salaries for teachers in France — Dangers 
from machinery — The advantages of life on the old New England 
farm — Its resemblance to the education we now give Begroes and In- 
dians — Its advantage for all-sided muscular development. 

We must glance at a few of the best and most tj^pical 
methods of muscular development, following the order: 
industrial education, manual training, gymnastics, and 
play, sports, and games. 

Industrial education is now imperative for every 
nation that would excel in agriculture, manufacture, and 
trade, not only because of the growing intensity of com- 
petition, but because of the decline of the apprentice 
system and the growing intricacy of processes, requir- 
ing only the skill needed for livelihood. Thousands of 
our youth of late have been diverted from secondary 
schools to the monotechnic or trade classes now estab- 
lished for horology, glass-work, brick-laying, carpentry, 
forging, dressmaking, cooking, typesetting, bookbinding, 
brewing, seamanship, work in leather, rubber, horticul- 
ture, gardening, photography, basketry, stock-raising, 
typewriting, stenography and bookkeeping, elementary 
commercial training for practical preparation for clerk- 
ships, etc. In this work not only is Boston, our most 

29 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

advanced city, as President Pritchett ^ has shown in 
detail, far behind Berlin, but German workmen and 
shopmen are slowly taking the best places even in 
England ; and but for a high tariff, which protects our in- 
feriority, the competitive pressure would be still greater. 
In Germany, especially, this training is far more diversi- 
fied than here, always being colored if not determined 
by the prevalent industry of the region and more special- 
ized and helped out by evening and even Sunday classes 
in the school buildings, and by the still strong apprentice 
system. Froebelian influence in manual training reaches 
through the eight school years and is in some respects 
better than ours in lower grades, but is very rarely co- 
educational, girls' work of sewing, knitting, crocheting, 
weaving, etc., not being considered manual training. 
There are now over 1,500 schools and workshops in 
Germany where manual training is taught; twenty-five 
of these are independent schools. The work really be- 
gan in 1875 with v. Kaas, and is promoted by the great 
Society for Boys' Handwork. ]\Iuch stress is laid on 
paper and pasteboard work in lower grades, under the 
influence of Kurufa of Darmstadt. Many objects for 
illustrating science are made, and one course embraces 
the Seyner water-wheel.^ 

In France it is made more effective by the equal sal- 
aries of teachers everywhere, thus securing better in- 
struction in the country. Adolescence is the golden 
period for acquiring the skill that comes by practice, so 
essential in the struggle for survival. In general this 
kind of motor education is least of all free, but sub- 

^ The Place of Industrial and Technical Training in Public Education. 
Technology Review, January, 1902, vol. 4, pp. 10-37. 

2 See an article by Dr. H. E. Kock, Education, December, 1902, vol. 
23, pp. 193-203. 

30 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 

servient to the tool, machine, process, finished product, 
or end in view ; and to these health and development are 
subordinated, so that they tend to be ever more narrow 
and special. The standard here is maximal efficiency of 
the capacities that earn. It may favor bad habitual 
attitudes, muscular development of but one part, ex- 
cessive large or small muscles, involve too much time or 
effort, unhealthful conditions, etc., but it has the great 
advantage of utility, which is the mainspring of all in- 
dustry. In a very few departments and places this 
training has felt the influence of the arts and crafts 
movement and has been faintly touched with the inspira- 
tion of beauty. While such courses give those who follow 
them marked advantage over those who do not, they are 
chiefly utilitarian and do little to mature or unfold the 
physical powers, and may involve arrest or degeneration. 
Where not one but several or many processes are 
taught, the case is far better. Of all work-schools, a 
good farm is probably the best for motor development. 
This is due to its great variety of occupations, healthful 
conditions, and the incalculable phyletic reenforcement 
from immemorial times. I have computed some three- 
score industries ^ as the census now classifies them, that 
were more or less generally known and practiced sixty 
years ago in a little township, which not only in this but 
in other respects has many features of an ideal educa- 
tional environment for adolescent boys, combining as it 
does not only physical and industrial, but civil and 
religious elements in wise proportions and with ped- 
agogic objectivity, and representing the ideal of such a 
state of intelligent citizen voters as was contemplated 
by the framers of our Constitution. 

* See my Boy Life in a Massachusetts Country Town Forty Years Ago. 
Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1906, vol. 13, pp. 192-207. 

31 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

Contrast this life with that of a " hand " in a 
modern shoe factory, who does all day but one of the 
eighty-one stages or processes from a tanned hide to a 
finished shoe, or of a man in a shirt-shop who is one of 
thirty-nine, each of whom does as piece-work a single 
step requiring great exactness, speed, and skill, and 
who never knows how a whole shirt is made, and we 
shall see that the present beginning of a revival of inter- 
est in muscular development comes none too early. So 
liberal is muscular education of this kind that its work 
in somewhat primitive form has been restored and copied 
in many features by many educational institutions for 
adolescents, of the Abbotsholme type and grade, and 
several others, whose purpose is to train for primitive 
conditions of colonial life. Thousands of school gardens 
have also been lately developed for lower grades, which 
have given a new impetus to the study of nature. 
Farm training at its best instills love of country, ruralizes 
taste, borrows some of its ideals from Goethe's pedagogic 
province, and perhaps even from Oilman's pie-shaped 
communities, with villages at the center irradiating to 
farms in all directions. In England, where by the law of 
primogeniture holdings are large and in few hands, this 
training has never flourished, as it has greatly in France, 
where nearly every adult male may own land and a large 
proportion will come to do so. So of processes. As a 
student in Germany I took a few lessons each of a 
bookbinder, a glassblower, a shoemaker, a plumber, and 
a blacksmith, and here I have learned in a crude way the 
technique of the gold-beater and old-fashioned broom- 
maker, etc., none of which come amiss in the laboratory ; 
and I am proud that I can still mow and keep my scythe 
sharp, chop, plow, milk, churn, make cheese and soap, 
braid a palm-leaf hat complete, knit, spin and even ' ' put 

32 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 

in a piece " in an old-fashioned hand loom, and weave 
frocking. But this pride bows low before the pupils 
of our best institutions for negroes, Indians, and juvenile 
delinquents, whose training is often in more than a score 
of industries and who to-day in my judgment receive the 
best training in the land, if judged by the annual growth 
in mind, morals, health, physique, ability, and knowl- 
edge, all taken together. Instead of seeking soft, ready- 
made places near home, such education impels to the 
frontier, to strike out new careers, to start at the bottom 
and rise by merit, beginning so low that every change 
must be a rise. Wherever youth thus trained are 
thrown, they land like a cat on all-fours and are armed 
cap-a-pie for the struggle of life. Agriculture, manu- 
facture, and commerce are the bases of national pros- 
perity; and on them all professions, institutions, and 
even culture, are more and more dependent, while the 
old ideals of mere study and brain-work are fast becom- 
ing obsolete. We really retain only the knowledge we 
apply. We should get up interest in new processes like 
that of a naturalist in new species. Those who leave 
school at any age or stage should be best fitted to take 
up their life work instead of leaving unfitted for it, aim- 
less and discouraged. Instead of dropping out limp 
and disheartened, we should train ^' struggle-for- 
lifeurs," in Daudet's phrase, and that betimes, so that 
the young come back to it not too late for securing the 
best benefits, after having wasted the years best fitted 
for it in profitless studies or in the hard school of fail- 
ure. By such methods many of our flabby, undeveloped, 
anemic, easy-living city youth would be regenerated in 
body and spirit. Some of the now oldest, richest, and 
most famous schools of the world were at first established 
by charity for poor boys who worked their way, and such 

33 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

institutions have an undreamed-of future. No others so 
well fit for a life of respectable and successful muscle 
work, and perhaps this should be central for all at this 
stage. This diversity of training develops the muscular 
activities rendered necessary by man's early development, 
which were so largely concerned with food, shelter, cloth- 
ing, making and selling commodities necessary for life, 
comfort and safety. The natural state of man is not war, 
but peace ; and perhaps Dawson ^ is right in thinking that 
three-fourths of man's physical activities in the past have 
gone into such vocations. Industry has determined the 
nature and trend of muscular development; and youth, 
who have pets, till the soil, build, manufacture, use tools, 
and master elementary processes and skills, are most truly 
repeating the history of the race. This, too, lays the 
best foundation for intellectual careers. The study of 
pure science, as well as its higher technology, follows 
rather than precedes this. In the largest sense this is 
the order of nature, from fundamental and generalized 
to finer accessory and specialized organs and functions; 
and such a sequence best weeds out and subordinates 
automatisms. The age of stress in most of these kinds 
of training is that of most rapid increment of muscular 
power, as we have seen in the middle and later teens 
rather than childhood, as some recent methods have mis- 
takenly assumed ; and this prepolytechnic work, wherever 
and in whatever degree it is possible, is a better adjunct 
of secondary courses than manual training, the sad fact 
being that, according to the best estimates, only a fraction 
of one per cent of those who need this training in this 
country are now receiving it. 

* The Muscular Activities Rendered Necessary by Man's Early 
Environment. American Physical Education Review, June, 1902, 
vol. 7, pp. 80-85. 

34 



CHAPTER IV 

MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD 

History of the movement — Its philosophy — The value of hand training 
in the development of the brain and its significance in the making of 
man — A grammar of our many industries hard — The best we do can 
reach but few — Very great defects in our manual training methods 
which do not base on science and make nothing salable — The Leipzig 
system — Sloyd is hypermethodic — These crude peasant industries 
can never satisfy educational needs — The gospel of work, William 
Morris and the arts and crafts movement — Its spirit desirable — The 
magic effects of a brief period of intense work — The natural develop- 
ment of the drawing instinct in the child. 

Manual training has many origins; but in its now 
most widely accepted form it came to us more than a 
generation ago from Moscow, and has its best representa- 
tion here in our new and often magnificent manual- 
training high schools and in many courses in other public 
schools. This work meets the growing demand of the 
country for a more practical education, a demand which 
often greatly exceeds the accommodations. The philos- 
ophy, if such it may be called, that underlies the move- 
ment, is simple, forcible, and sound, and not unlike 
Pestalozzi's '^ keine Kentnisse ohne Fertigkeiten/' ^ in 
that it lessens the interval between thinking and doing; 
helps to give control, dexterity, and skill an industrial 
trend to taste ; interests many not successful in ordinary 
school; tends to the better appreciation of good, honest 
work ; imparts new zest for some studies ; adds somewhat 
to the average length of the school period ; gives a sense 

» No knowledge without skill. 

35 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

of capacity and effectiveness, and is a useful preparation 
for a number of vocations. These claims are all well 
founded, and this work is a valuable addition to the peda- 
gogic agencies of any country or state. As man excels 
the higher anthropoids perhaps almost as much in hand 
power as in mind, and since the manual areas of the brain 
are wide near the psychic zones, and the cortical centers 
are thus directly developed, the hand is a potent instru- 
ment in opening the intellect as well as in training sense 
and will. It is no reproach to these schools that, full as 
they are, they provide for but an insignificant fraction of 
the nearly sixteen millions or twenty per cent of the 
young people of the country between fifteen and twenty- 
four. 

When we turn to the needs of these pupils, the errors 
and limitations of the method are painful to contem- 
plate. The work is essentially manual and offers little 
for the legs, where most of the muscular tissues of the 
body lie, those which respond most to training and are 
now most in danger of degeneration at this age ; the back 
and trunk also are little trained. Consideration of pro- 
portion and bilateral asymmetry are practically ignored. 
Almost in proportion as these schools have multiplied, 
the rage for uniformity, together with motives of econ- 
omy and administrative efficiency on account of over- 
crowding, have made them rigid and inflexible, on the 
principle that as the line lengthens the stake must be 
strengthened. This is a double misfortune; for the 
courses were not sufficiently considered at first and the 
plastic stage of adaptation was too short, while the meth- 
ods of industry have undergone vast changes since they 
were given shape. There are now between three and 
four hundred occupations in the census, more than half 
of these involving manual work, so that never perhaps 

36 



MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD 

was there so great a pedagogic problem as to make these 
natural developments into conscious art, to extract what 
may be called basal types. This requires an effort not 
without analogy to Aristotle's attempt to extract from 
the topics of the marketplace the underlying categories 
eternally conditioning all thought, or to construct a 
grammar of speech. Hardly an attempt worthy the 
name, not even the very inadequate one of a committee, 
has been made in this field to study the conditions and to 
meet them. Like Froebel's gifts and occupations, 
deemed by their author the very roots of human occu- 
pations in infant form, the processes selected are unde- 
rived and find their justification rather in their logical 
sequence and coherence than in being true norms of 
work. If these latter be attainable at all, it is not likely 
that they will fit so snugly in a brief curriculum, so that 
its simplicity is suspicious. The wards of the keys that 
lock the secrets of nature and human life are more intri- 
cate and mazy. As H. T. Bailey well puts it in sub- 
stance, a master in any art-craft must have a fourfold 
equipment: 1. Ability to grasp an idea and embody it. 

2. Power to utilize all nerve, and a wide repertory of 
methods, devices, recipes, discoveries, machines, etc. 

3. Knowledge of the history of the craft. 4. Skill in 
technical processes. American schools emphasize chiefly 
only the last. 

The actual result is thus a course rich in details 
representing wood and iron chiefly, and mostly ignoring 
other materials; the part of the course treating of the 
former, wooden in its teachings and distinctly tending to 
make joiners, carpenters, and cabinet-makers ; that of the 
latter, iron in its rigidity and an excellent school for 
smiths, mechanics, and machinists. These courses are not 
liberal because they hardly touch science, which is rap- 

37 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

idly becoming the real basis of every industry. Almost 
nothing that can be called scientific knowledge is re- 
quired or even much favored, save some geometrical and 
mechanical drawing and its implicates. These schools 
instinctively fear and repudiate plain and direct utility, 
or suspect its educational value or repute in the com- 
munity because of this strong bias toward a few trades. 
This tendency also they even fear, less often because 
unfortunately trade-unions in this country sometimes 
jealously suspect it and might vote down supplies, than 
because the teachers in these schools were generally 
trained in older scholastic and even classic methods and 
matter. Industry is everywhere and always for the 
sake of the product, and to cut loose from this as if it 
were a contamination is a fatal mistake. To focus on 
process only, with no reference to the object made, is 
here an almost tragic case of the sacrifice of content to 
form, which in all history has been the chief stigma of 
degeneration in education. Man is a tool-using animal; 
but tools are always only a means to an end, the latter 
prompting even their invention. Hence a course in tool 
manipulation only, with persistent refusal to consider 
the product lest features of trade-schools be introduced, 
has made most of our manual-training high schools 
ghastly, hollow, artificial institutions. Instead of mak- 
ing in the lower grades certain toys which are master- 
pieces of mechanical simplification, as tops and kites, 
and introducing such processes as glass-making and 
photography, and in higher grades making simple 
scientific apparatus more generic than machines, to open 
the great principles of the material universe, all is sac- 
rificed to supernormalized method. 

As in all hypermethodic schemes, the thought side is 
feeble. There is no control of the work of these schools 

38 



MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD 

by the higher technical institutions such as the college 
exercises over the high school, so that few of them do 
work that fits for advanced training or is thought best 
by technical faculties. In most of its current narrow 
forms, manual training will prove to be historically, as 
it is educationally, extemporized and tentative, and will 
soon be superseded by broader methods and be forgotten 
and obsolete, or cited only as a low point of departure 
from which future progress w^ill loom up. 

Indeed in more progressive centers, many new de- 
partures are now in the experimental stage. Goetze at 
Leipzig, as a result of long and original studies and 
trials, has developed courses in which pasteboard work 
and modeling are made of equal rank with wood and 
iron, and he has connected them even with the kinder- 
garten below. In general the whole industrial life of 
our day is being slowly explored in the quest of new 
educational elements; and rubber, lead, glass, textiles, 
metallurgical operations, agriculture, every tool and 
many machines, etc., are sure to contribute their choicest 
pedagogical factors to the final result. In every detail 
the prime consideration should be the nature and needs 
of the youthful body and wall at each age, their hygiene 
and fullest development ; and next, the closest connection 
with science at every point should do the same for the 
intellect. Each operation and each tool — the saw, knife, 
plane, screw, hammer, chisel, draw-shave, sandpaper, 
lathe — will be studied with reference to its orthopedic 
value, bilateral asymmetry, the muscles it develops, 
and the attitudes and motor habits it favors; and 
uniformity, which in France often requires classes to 
saw, strike, plane up, down, right, left, all to- 
gether, upon count and command, will give place to 
individuality. 

4 39 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

Sloyd has certain special features and claims. The 
word means skilful, deft. The movement was organized 
in Sweden a quarter of a century ago as an effort to 
prevent the extinction by machinery of peasant home 
industry during the long winter night. Home sloyd was 
soon installed in an institution of its own for training 
teachers at Naas. It works in wood only, with little 
machinery, and is best developed for children of from 
eleven to fifteen. It no longer aims to make artisans; 
but its manipulations are meant to be developmental, 
to teach both sexes not only to be useful but self -active 
and self-respecting, and to revere exactness as a form of 
truthfulness. It assumes that all and especially the 
motor-minded can really understand only what they 
make, and that one can work like a peasant and think 
like a philosopher. It aims to produce wholes rather 
than parts like the Eussian system, and to be so essen- 
tially educational that, as a leading exponent says, its 
best effects would be conserved if the hands were cut 
off. This change of its original utilitarianism from the 
lower to the liberal motor development of the middle 
and upper classes and from the land where it originated 
to another, has not eliminated the dominant marks of 
its origin in its models, the Penates of the sloyd house- 
hold, the unique features of which persist like a na- 
tional school of art, despite transplantation and trans- 
formation.^ 

Sloyd at its best tries to correlate several series, viz., 
exercises, tools, drawing, and models. Each must be 
progressive, so that every new step in each series in- 
volves a new and next developmental step in all the 

1 This I have elsewhere tried to show in detail. Criticisms of High 
School Physics and Manual Training and Mechanic Arts in High Schools, 
Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 193-204. 

40 



MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD 

others, and all together, it is claimed, fit the order and 
degree of development of each power appealed to in the 
child. Yet there has been hardly an attempt to justify 
either the physiological or the psychological reason of a 
single step in any of these series, and the coordination 
of the series even with each other, to say nothing of 
their adaptation to the stages of the child 's development. 
This, if as pat and complete as is urged, would indeed 
constitute on the whole a paragon of all the harmony, 
beauty, totality in variety, etc., which make it so mag- 
nificent in the admirer's eyes. But the " 45 tools, 72 
exercises, 31 models, 15 of which are joints," all learned 
by teachers in one school year of daily work and by 
pupils in four years, are overmethodic ; and such cor- 
relation is impossible in so many series at once. Every 
dual order, even of work and unfoldment of powers, is 
hard enough, since the fall lost us Eden ; and woodwork, 
could it be upon that of the tree of knowledge itself, 
is incompatible with enjoying its fruit. Although a 
philosopher may see the whole universe in its smallest 
part, all his theory can not reproduce educational wholes 
from fragments of it. The real merits of sloyd have 
caused its enthusiastic leaders to magnify its scope and 
claims far beyond their modest bounds; and although 
its field covers the great transition from childhood to 
youth, one searches in vain both its literature and prac- 
tise for the slightest recognition of the new motives and 
methods that puberty suggests. Especially in its par- 
tially acclimatized forms to American conditions, it is 
all adult and almost scholastic ; and as the most elaborate 
machinery may sometimes be run by a poor power-wheel, 
if the stream be swift and copious enough, so the mighty 
current that sets toward motor education would give it 
some degree of success were it worse and less economic 

41 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

of pedagogic momentum than it is. It holds singularly 
aloof from other methods of efferent training and re- 
sists coordination with them, and its provisions for other 
than hand development are slight. It will be one of 
the last to accept its true but modest place as contribut- 
ing certain few but precious elements in the greater 
synthesis that impends. Indian industries, basketry, 
pottery, bead, leather, bows and arrows, bark, etc., which 
our civilization is making lost arts by forcing the white 
man 's industries upon red men at reservation schools and 
elsewhere, need only a small part of the systemization 
that Swedish peasant work has received to develop even 
greater educational values; and the same is true of the 
indigenous household work of the old New England 
farm, the real worth and possibilities of which are only 
now, and perhaps too late, beginning to be seen by a 
few educators. 

This brings us to the arts and crafts movement, 
originating with Carlyle's gospel of work and Ruskin's 
medievalism, developed by William Morris and his 
disciples at the Red House, checked awhile by the ridi- 
cule of the comic opera ' ' Patience, ' ' and lately revived 
in some of its features by Cobden-Sanderson, and of late 
to some extent in various centers in this country. Its 
ideal was to restore the day of the seven ancient guilds 
and of Hans Sachs, the poet cobbler, when conscience 
and beauty inspired work, and the hand did what ma- 
chines only imitate and vulgarize. In the past, which 
this school of motor culture harks back to, work, for 
which our degenerate age lacks even respect, was indeed 
praise. Refined men and women have remembered 
these early days, when their race was in its prime, as 
a lost paradise which they would regain by designing 
and even weaving tapestries and muslins ; experimenting 

42 



MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD 

in vats with dyes to rival Tyrian purple ; printing and 
binding by hand books that surpass the best of the 
Aldines and Elzevirs; carving in old oak; hammering 
brass; forging locks, irons, and candlesticks; becoming 
artists in burned wood and leather; seeking old effects 
of simplicity and solidity in furniture and decoration, 
as well as in architecture, stained glass, and to some 
extent in dress and manners; and all this toil and moil 
was ad majorem gloriam hominis ^ in a new socialistic 
state, where the artist, and even the artisan, should 
take his rightful place above the man who merely knows. 
The day of the mere professor, who deals in knowledge, 
is gone ; and the day of the doer, who creates, has come. 
The brain and the hand, too long divorced and each weak 
and mean without the other; use and beauty, each alone 
vulgar ; letters and labor, each soulless without the other, 
are henceforth to be one and inseparable ; and this union 
will lift man to a higher level. The workman in his 
apron and paper hat, inspired by the new socialism and 
the old spirit of chivalry as revived by Scott, revering 
Wagner's revival of the old Deutschenthum that was 
to conquer Christ enthum, or Tennyson's Arthurian 
cycle — this was its ideal; even as the Jews rekindled 
their loyalty to the ancient traditions of their race and 
made their Bible under Ezra; as we begin to revere the 
day of the farmer-citizen, who made our institutions, or 
as some of us would revive his vanishing industrial life 
for the red man. 

Although this movement was by older men and 
women and had in it something of the longing regret 
of senescence for days that are no more, it shows us 
the glory which invests racial adolescence when it is 



To the greater glory of man. 

43 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

recalled in maturity, the time when the soul can best 
appreciate the value of its creations and its possibilities, 
and really lives again in its glamour and finds in it its 
greatest inspiration. Hence it has its lessons for us 
here. A touch, but not too much of it, should be felt in 
all manual education, which is just as capable of ideal- 
ism as literary education. This gives soul, interest, con- 
tent, beauty, taste. If not a polyphrastic philosophy 
seeking to dignify the occupation of the workshop by 
a pretentious Volapiik of reasons and abstract theories, 
we have here the pregnant suggestion of a psychological 
quarry of motives and spirit opened and ready to be 
worked. Thus the best forces from the past should be 
turned on to shape and reenf orce the best tendencies of 
the present. The writings of the above gospelers of work 
not only could and should, but will be used to inspire 
manual-training high schools, sloyd and even some of 
the less scholastic industrial courses; but each is incom- 
plete without the other. These books and those that 
breathe their spirit should be the mental workshop of all 
who do tool, lathe, and forge work ; who design and draw 
patterns, carve or mold; or of those who study how to 
shape matter for human uses, and whose aim is to ob- 
tain diplomas or certificates of fitness to teach all such 
things. The muse of art and even of music will have 
some voice in the great synthesis which is to gather up 
the scattered, hence ineffective, elements of secondary 
motor training, in forms which shall represent all the 
needs of adolescents in the order and proportion that 
nature and growth stages indicate, drawing, with this 
end supreme, upon all the resources that history and 
reform offer to our selection. All this can never make 
work become play. Indeed it will and should make work 
harder and more unlike play and of another genus, be- 

44 



MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD 

cause the former is thus given its own proper soul and 
leads its own distinct, but richer, and more abounding 
life. 

I must not close this section without brief mention of 
two important studies that have supplied each a new 
and important determination concerning laws of work 
peculiar to adolescence. 

The main telegraphic line requires a speed of over 
seventy letters per minute of all whom they will em- 
ploy. As a sending rate this is not very diiftcult and 
is often attained after two months ' practise. This stand- 
ard for a receiving rate is harder and later, and inquiry 
at schools where it is taught shows that about seventy- 
five per cent of those who begin the study fail to reach 
this speed and so are not employed. Bryan and Harter ^ 
explained the rate of improvement in both sending and 
receiving, with results represented for one typical sub- 
ject in the curve on the following page. 

From the first, sending improves most rapidly and 
crosses the dead-line a few months before the receiving 
rate, which may fall short. Curves 1 and 2 represent the 
same student. I have added line 3 to illustrate the 
three-fourths who fail. Receiving is far less pleasant 
than sending, and years of daily practise at ordinary 
rates will not bring a man to his maximum rate; he 
remains on the low plateau with no progress beyond a 
certain point. If forced by stress of work, danger of 
being dropped, or by will power to make a prolonged 
and intense effort, he breaks through his hidebound rate 
and permanently attains a faster pace. This is true at 
each step, and every advance seems to cost even more 



1 studies in the Physiology and Psychology of the Telegraphic 
Language. Psychological Review, January, 1897, vol. 4, pp. 27-53, 
and July, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 345-375. 

45 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

intensive effort than the former one. At length, for 
those who go on, the rate of receiving, which is a more 
complex process, exceeds that of sending ; and the curves 
of the above figure would cross if prolonged. The ex- 
pert receives so much faster than he sends that abbre- 
viated codes are used, and he may take eighty to eighty- 
five words a minute on a typewriter in correct form. 
The motor curve seems to asymptotically approach a 




perhaps physiological limit, which the receiving curve 
does not suggest. This seems a special case of a general 
though not yet explained law. In learning a foreign 
language, speaking is first and easiest, and hearing takes 
a late but often sudden start to independence. Perhaps 
this holds of every ability. To Bryan this suggests as 
a hierarchy of habits, the plateau of little or no im- 
provement, meaning that lower order habits are ap- 
proaching their maximum but are not yet automatic 
enough to leave the attention free to attack higher order 
habits. The second ascent from drudgery to freedom, 

46 



MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD 

which comes through automatism, is often as sudden as 
the first ascent, ^ne stroke of attention comes to do 
what once took many. To attain such effective speed is 
not dependent on reaction time. This shooting together 
of units distinguishes the master from the man, the 
genius from the hack. In many, if not all, skills where 
expertness is sought, there is a long discouraging level, 
and then for the best a sudden ascent, as if here, too, as 
we have reason to think in the growth of both the body 
as a whole and in that of its parts, nature does make 
leaps and attains her ends by alternate rests and rushes. 
Youth lives along on a low level of interest and accom- 
plishment and then starts onward, is transformed, con- 
verted; the hard becomes easy; the old life sinks to a 
lower stratum; and a new and higher order, perhaps a 
higher brain level and functions, is evolved. The 
practical implication here of the necessity of hard con- 
centrative effort as a condition of advancement is re- 
enforced by a quotation from Senator Stanford on the 
effect of early and rather intensive work at not too long 
periods in training colts for racing. Let-ups are espe- 
cially dangerous. He says, ''It is the supreme effort 
that develops." This, I may add, suggests what is de- 
veloped elsewhere, that truly spontaneous attention is 
conditioned by spontaneous muscle tension, which is a 
function of growth, and that muscles are thus organs 
of the mind; and also that even voluntary attention is 
motivated by the same nisus of development even in its 
most adult form, and that the products of science, in- 
vention, discovery, as well as the association plexus of all 
that was originally determined in the form of conscious- 
ness, are made by rhythmic alternation of attack, as it 
moves from point to point creating diversions and re- 
currence. 

47 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

The other study, although quite independent, is in 
part a special application and illustration of the same 
principle. 

At the age of four or five, when they can do little 
more than scribble, children's chief interest in pictures 
is as finished products; but in the second period, which 
Lange calls that of artistic illusion, the child sees in his 
own work not merely what it represents, but an image 
of fancy back of it. This, then, is the golden period for 
the development of power to create artistically. The 
child loves to draw everything with the pleasure chiefly 
in the act, and he cares little for the finished picture. 
He draws out of his own head, and not from copy before 
his eye. Anything and everything is attempted in bold 
lines in this golden age of drawing. If he followed the 
teacher, looked carefully and drew what he saw, he 
would be abashed at his production. Indians, conflagra- 
tions, games, brownies, trains, pageants, battles — every- 
thing is graphically portrayed ; but only the little artist 
himself sees the full meaning of his lines. Criticism or 
drawing strictly after nature breaks this charm, since 
it gives place to mechanical reproduction in which the 
child has little interest. This awakens him from his 
dream to a realization that he can not draw, and from 
ten to fifteen his power of perceiving things steadily in- 
creases and he makes almost no progress in drawing. 
Adolescence arouses the creative faculty and the desire 
and ability to draw are checked and decline after thir- 
teen or fourteen. The curve is the plateau which 
Barnes has described. The child has measured his own 
productions upon the object they reproduced and found 
them wanting, is discouraged and dislikes drawing. 
From twelve on, Barnes found drawing more and more 
distasteful; and this, too, Lukens found to be the opin- 

48 . 



MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD 

ion of our art teachers. The pupils may draw very 
properly and improve in technique, but the interest 
is gone. This is the condition in which most men re- 
main all their lives. Their power to appreciate steadily 
increases. Only a few gifted adolescents about this age 
begin to develop a new zest in production, rivaling that 
of the period from five to ten, when their satisfaction 
is again chiefly in creation. These are the artists whose 
active powers dominate. 

Lukens ^ finds in his studies of drawling, that in what 
he calls his fourth period of artistic development, there 
are those " who during adolescence experience a rebirth 
of creative power." Zest in creation then often be- 
comes a stronger incentive to work than any pleasure 
or profit to be derived from the finished product, so 
that in this the propitious conditions of the first golden 
age of childhood are repeated and the deepest satisfac- 
tion is again found in the w^ork itself. At about four- 
teen or fifteen, which is the transition period, nascent 
faculties sometimes develop very rapidly. Lukens ^ 
draws the interesting curve shown on the following page. 

The reciprocity between the powder to produce and 
that to appreciate, roughly represented in the above 
curve, very likely is true also in the domain of music, 
and may be, perhaps, a general law of development. 
Certain it is that the adolescent power to apperceive 
and appreciate never so far outstrips his power to pro- 



1 A study of Children's Drawings in the Early Years. Pedagogical 
Seminary, October, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 79-101. See also Drawing in the 
Early Years. Proceedings of the National Educational Association, 
1899, pp. 946-953. Das Kind als Kunstler, von C. Gotze. Hamburg, 
1898. The Genetic vs. the Logical Order in Drawing, by F. Burk. Ped- 
agogical Seminary, September, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 296-323. 

- Die Entwickelungsstufen beim Zeichnen. Die Kinderfehler, Sep- 
tei:^iber, 1897, vol. 2, pp. 166-179. 

49 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 



duce or reproduce as about midway in the teens. Now 
impressions sink deepest. The greatest artists are 
usually those who paint later, when the expressive 
powers are developed, what they have felt most deeply 
and known best at this age, and not those who in the late 
twenties, or still later, have gone to new environments 
and sought to depict them. All young people draw best 
those objects they love most, and their proficiency should 





Barnes's Plateau 
Illusion 



^--'#^^°" 



J I L 



J I L 



2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 U 12 13 14. 15 16 17 18 19 20 
— ^Motor,, creative or productive power. 
Sensory or receptive interest in the finished product. 

be some test of the contents of their minds. They must 
put their own consciousness into a picture. At the 
dawn of this stage of appreciation the esthetic tastes 
should be stimulated by exposure to, and instructed in 
feeling for, the subject-matter of masterpieces; and in- 
struction in technique, detail, criticism, and learned 
discrimination of schools of painting should be given 
intermittently. Art should not now be for art's sake, 
but for the sake of feeling and character, life, and con- 
duct; it should be adjunct to morals, history, and lit- 
erature; and in all, edification should be the goal; and 

50 



MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD 

personal interest, and not that of the teacher, should be 
the guide. Insistence on production should be eased, and 
the receptive imagination, now so hungry, should be fed 
and reenforced by story and all other accessories. By 
such a curriculum, potential creativeness, if it exists, 
will surely be evoked in its own good time. Ut will, at 
first, attempt no commonplace drawing-master themes, 
but will essay the highest that the imagination can bode 
forth. It may be crude and lame in execution, but it 
will be lofty, perhaps grand ; and if it is original in con- 
sciousness, it will be in effect. Most creative painters 
before twenty have grappled with the greatest scenes 
in literature or turning points in history, representa- 
tions of the loftiest truths, embodiments of the most 
inspiring ideals. None who deserve the name of artist 
copy anything now, and least of all with objective 
fidelity to nature; and the teacher that represses or 
criticizes this first point of genius, or who can not 
pardon the grave faults of technique inevitable at this 
age when ambition ought to be too great for power, 
is not an educator but a repressor, a pedagogic Philis- 
tine committing, like so many of his calling in other 
fields, the unpardonable sin against budding promise, 
always at this age so easily blighted. Just as the child 
of six or seven should be encouraged in his strong in- 
stinct to draw the most complex scenes of his daily life, 
so now the inner life should find graphic utterance in 
all its intricacy up to the full limit of unrepressed 
courage. For the great majority, on the other hand, 
who only appreciate and will never create, the mind, 
if it have its rights, will be stored with the best images 
and sentiments of art; for at this time they are best 
remembered and sink deepest into heart and life. Now, 
although the hand may refuse, the fancy paints the 

51 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

world in brightest hues and fairest forms; and such an 
opportunity for infecting the soul with vaccine of 
ideality, hope, optimism, and courage in adversity, will 
never come again. I believe that in few departments 
are current educational theories and practises so hard on 
youth of superior gifts, just at the age when all become 
geniuses for a season, very brief for most, prolonged 
for some, and permanent for the best. We do not know 
how to teach to see, hear, and feel when the sense cen- 
ters are most indelibly impressible, and to give relative 
rest to the hand during the years w^hen its power of 
accuracy is abated and when all that is good is idealized 
furthest, and confidence in ability to produce is at its 
lowest ebb. 

Finally, our divorce between industrial and manual 
training is abnormal, and higher technical education is 
the chief sufferer. Professor Thurston, of Cornell, who 
has lately returned from a tour of inspection abroad, re- 
ported that to equal Germany we now need : " 1. Twentj^ 
technical universities, having in their schools of en- 
gineering 50 instructors and 500 students each. 2. 
Two thousand technical high schools or manual-training 
schools, each having not less than 200 students and 10 
instructors." If we have elementary trade-schools, this 
would mean technical high schools enough to accommo- 
date 700,000 students, served by 20,000 teachers. With 
the strong economic arguments in this direction we are 
not here concerned ; but that there are tendencies to unfit 
youth for life by educational method and matter shown 
in strong relief from this standpoint, we shall point out 
in a later chapter. 



52 



CHAPTER V 

GYMNASTICS 

The story of Jahn and the Turners — The enthusiasm which this move- 
ment generated in Germany — The ideal of bringing out latent powers 
— The concept of more perfect voluntary control — Swedish gymnastics 
— Doing everything possible for the body as a machine — Liberal phy- 
sical culture — Ling's orthogenic scheme of economic postures and 
movements and correcting defects — The ideal of symmetry and pre- 
scribing exercises to bring the body to a standard — Lamentable lack 
of correlation between these four systems — Illustrations of the great 
good that a systematic training can effect — Athletic records — Greek 
physical training. 

Under the term gymnastics, literally naked exercises, 
we here include those denuded of all utilities or ulterior 
ends save those of physical culture. This is essentially 
modern and was unknown in antiquity, where training 
was for games, for war, etc. Several ideals underlie 
this movement, which although closely related are dis- 
tinct and as yet by no means entirely harmonized. These 
may be described as follows : 

A. One aim of Jahn, more developed by Spiess, and 
their successors, was to do everything physically pos- 
sible for the body as a mechanism. Many postures and 
attitudes are assumed and many movements made that 
are never called for in life. Some of these are so novel 
that a great variety of new apparatus had to be de- 
vised to bring them out; and Jahn invented many new 
names, some of them without etymologies, to designate 
the repertory of his discoveries and inventions that ex- 
tended the range of motor life. Common movements, 

53 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

industries, and even games, train only a limited number 
of muscles, activities, and coordinations, and leave more 
or less unused groups and combinations, so that many 
latent possibilities slumber, and powers slowly lapse 
through disuse. Not only must these be rescued, but 
the new nascent possibilities of modern progressive man 
must be addressed and developed. Even the com- 
mon things that the average untrained youth can not 
do are legion, and each of these should be a new incen- 
tive to the trainer as he realizes how very far below 
their motor possibilities most men live. The man of 
the future may, and even must, do things impossible in 
the past and acquire new motor variations not given by 
heredity. Our somatic frame and its powers must 
therefore be carefully studied, inventoried, and as- 
sessed afresh, and a kind and amount of exercise re- 
quired that is exactly proportioned, not perhaps to the 
size but to the capability of each voluntary muscle. Thus 
only can we have a truly humanistic physical develop- 
ment, analogous to the training of all the powers of the 
mind in a broad, truly liberal, and non-professional or 
non-vocational educational curriculum. The body will 
thus have its rightful share in the pedagogic traditions 
and inspirations of the renaissance. Thus only can we 
have a true scale of standardized culture values for 
efferent processes; and from this we can measure the 
degrees of departure, both in the direction of excess and 
defect, of each form of work, motor habit, and even 
play. Many modern Epigoni in the wake of this great 
ideal, where its momentum was nearly spent, feeling 
that new activities might be discovered with virtues 
hitherto undreamed of, have almost made fetiches of 
special disciplines, both developmental and corrective, 
that are pictured and lauded in scores of manuals. 

54 



GYMNASTICS 

Others have had expectations no less excessive in the 
opposite direction and have argued that the greatest 
possible variety of movements best developed the great- 
est total of motor energy. Jalm especially thus made 
gymnastics a special art and inspired great enthusiasm 
of humanity, and the songs of his pupils were of a 
better race of man and a greater and united fatherland. 
It was this feature that made his work unique in the 
world, and his disciples are fond of reminding us of the 
fact that it was just about one generation of men after 
the acme of influence of his system that, in 1870, Ger- 
many showed herself the greatest military power since 
ancient Rome, and took the acknowledged leadership of 
the world both in education and science. 

These theorizations even in their extreme forms have 
been not only highly suggestive but have brought great 
and new enthusiasms and ideals into the educational 
world that admirably fit adolescence. The motive of 
bringing out latent, decaying, or even new powers, 
skills, knacks, and feats, is full of inspiration. Patriot- 
ism is aroused, for thus the country can be better served ; 
thus the German Fatherland was to be restored and 
unified after the dark days that followed the humilia- 
tion of Jena. Now the ideals of religion are invoked 
that the soul may have a better and regenerated somatic 
organism with which to serve Jesus and the Church. 
Exercise is made a form of praise to God and of ser- 
vice to man, and these motives are reenforced by those 
of the new hygiene which strives for a new wholeness- 
holiness, and would purify the body as the temple of 
the Holy Ghost. Thus in Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciation training schools and gymnasiums the gospel of 
Christianity is preached anew and seel^ to bring sal- 
vation to man's physical frame, which the still linger- 
5 55 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

ing effects of asceticism have caused to be too long neg- 
lected in its progressive degeneration. As the Greek 
games were in honor of the gods, so now the body is 
trained to better glorify God; and regimen, chastity, 
and temperance are given a new momentum. The 
physical salvation thus wrought will be, when ade- 
quately written, one of the most splendid chapters in the 
modern history of Christianity. Military ideals have 
been revived in cult and song to hearten the warfare 
against evil within and without. Strength is prayed 
for as well as worked for, and consecrated to the 
highest uses. Last but not least, power thus developed 
over a large surface may be applied to athletic con- 
tests in the field, and victories here are valuable as fore- 
gleams of how sweet the glory of achievements in higher 
moral and spiritual tasks will taste later. 

The dangers and sources of error in this ideal of all- 
sided training are, alas, only too obvious, although they 
only qualify its paramount good. First, it is impossible 
thus to measure the quanta of training needed so as 
rightly to assign to each its modicum and best modality 
of training. Indeed no method of doing this has ever 
been attempted, but the assessments have been arbitrary 
and conjectural, probably right in some and wrong in 
other respects, with no adequate criterion or test for 
either save only empirical experience. Secondly, hered- 
ity, which lays its heavy ictus upon some neglected 
forms of activity and fails of all support for others, 
has been ignored. As we shall see later, one of the 
best norms here is phyletic emphasis, and what lacks 
this must at best be feeble; and if new powers are un- 
folding, their growth must be very slow and they must 
be nurtured as tender buds for generations. Thirdly, 
too little regard is had for the vast differences in in- 

56 



GYMNASTICS 

dividuals, most of whom need much personal pre- 
scription. 

B. In practise the above ideal is never isolated from 
others. Perhaps the most closely associated with it is 
that of increased volitional control. Man is largely a 
creature of habit, and many of his activities are more 
or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environ- 
ment. Every new power of controlling these by the will 
frees man from slavery and widens the field of freedom. 
To acquire the power of doing all with consciousness and 
volition mentalizes the body, gives control over to higher 
brain levels, and develops them by rescuing activities 
from the dominance of lower centers. Thus mens agi- 
tat molem} This end is favored by the Swedish 
commando exercises, which require great alertness of 
attention to translate instantly a verbal order into an 
act and also, although in somewhat less degree, by quick 
imitation of a leader. The stimulus of music and rhythm 
are excluded becaiLse thought to interfere with this 
end. A somewhat sophisticated form of this goal is 
sought by several Delsartian schemes of relaxation, de- 
composition, and recomposition of movements. To do 
all things with consciousness and to encroach on the field 
of instinct involves new and more vivid sense impres- 
sions, the range of which is increased directly as that 
of motion, the more closely it approaches the focus of 
attention. By thus analyzing settled and established 
coordinations, their elements are set free and may be 
organized into new combinations, so that the former is 
the first stage toward becoming a virtuoso with new 
special skills. This is the road to inner secrets or in- 
tellectual rules of professional and expert successes, such 

1 Mind rules the body. 

57 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

as older athletes often rely upon when their strength be- 
gins to wane. Every untrained automatism must be 
domesticated, and every striated muscle capable of 
direct muscular control must be dominated by volition. 
Thus tensions and incipient contractures that drain off 
energy can be relaxed by fiat. Sandow's '' muscle 
dance/' the differentiation of movements of the right 
and left hand — one, e. g., writing a French madrigal 
while the other is drawing a picture of a country dance, 
or each playing tunes of disparate rhythm and char- 
acter simultaneously on the piano — controlling heart 
rate, moving the ears, crying, laughing, blushing, mov- 
ing the bowels, etc., at will, feats of inhibition of re- 
flexes, stunts of all kinds, proficiency with many tools, 
deftness in sports — these altogether would mark the 
extremes in this direction. 

This, too, has its inspiration for youth. To be a 
universal adept like Hippias suggests Diderot and the 
encyclopedists in the intellectual realm. To do all with 
consciousness is a means to both remedial and expert 
ends. Motor life often needs to be made over to a 
greater or less extent; and that possibilities of vastly 
greater accomplishments exist than are at present real- 
ized, is undoubted, even in manners and morals, which 
are both at root only motor habits. Indeed consciousness 
itself is largely and perhaps wholly corrective in its very 
essence and origin. Thus life is adjusted to new en- 
vironments; and if the Platonic postulate be correct, 
that untaught virtues that come by nature and instinct 
are no virtues, but must be made products of reflection 
and reason, the sphere and need of this principle is 
great indeed. But this implies a distrust of physical 
human nature as deep-seated and radical as that of Cal- 
vinism for the unregenerate heart, against which mod- 

58 



GYMNASTICS 

ern common sense, so often the best muse of both psycho- 
physics and pedagogy, protests. Individual prescription 
is here as imperative as it is difficult. Wonders that now 
seem to be most incredible, both of hurt and help, can 
undoubtedly be wrought, but analysis should always be 
for the sake of synthesis and never be beyond its need 
and assured completion. No thoughtful student fully 
informed of the facts and tentatives in this field can 
doubt that here lies one of the most promising fields of 
future development, full of far-reaching and rich re- 
sults for those, as yet far too few, experts in physical 
training, who have philosophic minds, command the 
facts of modern psychology, and whom the w^orld awaits 
now as never before. 

C. Another yet closely correlated ideal is that of 
economic postures and movements. The system of Ling 
is less orthopedic than orthogenic, although he sought 
primarily to correct bad attitudes and perverted growth. 
Starting from the respiratory and proceeding to the 
muscular system, he and his immediate pupils were con- 
tent to refer to the ill-shapen bodies of most men about 
them. One of their important aims was to relax the flexor 
and tone up the extensor muscles and to open the human 
form into postures as opposite as possible to those of the 
embryo, which it tends so persistently to approximate 
in sitting, and in fatigue and collapse attitudes gener- 
ally. The head must balance on the cervical vertebrae 
and not call upon the muscles of the neck to keep it 
from rolling off; the weight of the shoulders must be 
thrown back off the thorax; the spine be erect to allow 
the abdomen free action; the joints of the thigh ex- 
tended; the hand and arm supinated, etc. Bones must 
relieve muscles and nerves. Thus an erect, self-respect- 
ing carriage must be given, and the unfortunate associa- 

59 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

tion, so difficult to overcome, between effort and an 
involuted posture must be broken up. This means 
economy and a great saving of vital energy. Extensor 
action goes with expansive, flexor with depressive states 
of mind; hence courage, buoyancy, hope, are favored 
and handicaps removed. All that is done with great 
effort causes wide irradiation of tensions to the other 
half of the body and also sympathetic activities in those 
not involved; the law of maximal ease and minimal ex- 
penditure of energy must be always striven for, and 
the interests of the viscera never lost sight of. This 
involves educating weak and neglected muscles, and like 
the next ideal, often shades over by almost imperceptible 
gradation into the passive movements by the Zander 
machines- Realizing that certain activities are suffi- 
ciently or too much emphasized in ordinary life, stress 
is laid upon those which are complemental to them, so 
that there is no pretense of taking charge of the totality 
of motor processes, the intention being principally to 
supplement deficiencies, to insure men against being 
warped, distorted, or deformed by their work in life, 
to compensate specialties and perform more exactly what 
recreation to some extent aims at. 

This wholesome but less inspiring endeavor, which 
combats one of the greatest evils that under modern 
civilization threatens man's physical weal, is in some 
respects as easy and practical as it is useful. The great 
majority of city bred men, as well as all students, are 
prone to deleterious effects from too much sitting; and 
indeed there is anatomical evidence in the structure of 
the tissues, and especially the blood-vessels of the groins, 
that, at his best, man is not yet entirely adjusted to the 
upright position. So a method that straightens knees, 
hips, spine, and shoulders, or combats the school-desk 

60 



GYMNASTICS 

attitude, is a most salutary contribution to a great and 
growing need. In the very act of stretching, and per- 
haps yawning, for which much is to be said, nature itself 
suggests such correctives and preventives. To save men 
from being victims of their occupations is often to add 
a better and larger half to their motor development. 
The danger of the system, which now best represents 
this ideal, is inflexibility and overscholastic treatment. 
It needs a great range of individual variations if it 
would do more than increase circulation, respiration, 
and health, or the normal functions of internal organs 
and fundamental physiological activities. To clothe the 
frame with honest muscles that are faithful servants 
of the will adds not only strength, more active habits 
and efficiency, but health; and in its material installa- 
tion this system is financially economic. Personal faults 
and shortcomings are constantly pointed out where this 
work is best represented, and it has a distinct advantage 
in inciting an acquaintance Avith physiology and invit- 
ing the larger fields of medical knowledge. 

D. The fourth gymnastic aim is symmetry and cor- 
rect proportions. Anthropometry an4 average girths 
and dimensions, strength, etc., of the parts of the body 
are first charted in percentile grades ; and each individual 
is referred to the apparatus and exercises best fitted to 
correct weaknesses and subnormalities. The norms here 
followed are not the canons of Greek art, but those 
established by the measurement of the largest numbers 
properly grouped by age, weight, height, etc. Young 
men are found to differ very widely. Some can lift 
1,000 pounds, and some not 100; some can lift their 
weight between twenty and forty times, and some not 
once; some are most deficient in legs, others in shoul- 
ders, arms, backs, chests. By photography, tape, and 

61 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

scales, each is interested in his own bodily condition and 
incited to overcome his greatest defects; and those best 
endowed by nature to attain ideal dimensions and make 
new records are encouraged along these lines. Thus this 
ideal is also largely though not exclusively remedial. 

This system can arouse youth to the greatest pitch 
of zest in watching their own rapidly multiplying curves 
of growth in dimensions and capacities, in plotting 
curves that record their own increment in girths, lifts, 
and other tests, and in observing the effects of sleep, 
food, correct and incorrect living upon a system so ex- 
quisitely responsive to all these influences as are the mus- 
cles. To learn to know and grade excellence and defect, 
to be known for the list of things one can do and to have 
a record, or to realize what w^e lack of powder to break 
best records, even to know that we are strengthening 
some point where heredity has left us with some short- 
age and perhaps danger, the realization of all this may 
bring the first real and deep feeling for growth that may 
become a passion later in things of the soul. Growth 
always has its selfish aspects, and to be constantly pass- 
ing our own examination in this respect is a new and 
perhaps sometimes too self-conscious endeavor of our 
young college barbarians; but it is on the whole a 
healthful regulative, and this form of the struggle to- 
ward perfection and escape from the handicap of birth 
will later move upward to the intellectual and moral 
plane. To kindle a sense of physical beauty of form 
in every part, such as a sculptor has, may be to start 
youth on the lowest round of the Platonic ladder that 
leads up to the vision of ideal beauty of soul, if his 
ideal be not excess of brawn, or mere brute strength, 
but the true proportion represented by the classic or 
mean temperance balanced like justice between all ex- 

C2 



GYMNASTICS 



\^y 



tremes. Hard, patient, regular work, with the right 
dosage for this self -cultural end, has thus at the same 
time a unique moral effect. 

The dangers of this system are also obvious. Na- 
ture's intent can not be too far thwarted; and as in 
mental training the question is always pertinent, so here 
we may ask whether it be not best in all cases to some 
extent, and in some cases almost exclusively, to develop 
in the direction in which we most excel, to emphasize 
physical individuality and even idiosyncrasy, rather 
than to strive for monotonous uniformity. Weaknesses 
and parts that lag behind are the most easily overworked 
to the point of reaction and perhaps permanent injury. 
Again, work for curative purposes lacks the exuberance 
of free sports: it is not inspiring to make up areas; 
and therapeutic exercises imposed like a sentence for 
the shortcomings of our forebears bring a whiff of the 
atmosphere of the hospital, if not of the prison, into 
the gymnasium. 

These four ideals, while so closely interrelated, are as 
yet far from harmonized. Swedish, Turner, Sargent, 
and American systems are each, most unfortunately, still 
too blind to the others' merits and too conscious of 
the others' shortcomings. To some extent they are pre- 
vented from getting together by narrow devotion to a 
single cult, aided sometimes by a pecuniary interest in 
the sale of their own apparatus and books or in the train- 
ing of teachers according to one set of rubrics. The 
real elephant is neither a fan, a rope, a tree nor a log, 
as the blind men in the fable contended, each thinking 
the part he had touched to be the whole. This inability 
of leaders to combine causes uncertainty and lack of 
confidence in, and of enthusiastic support for, any system 
on the part of the public. Even the radically different 

63 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

needs of the sexes have failed of recognition from the 
same partizanship. All together represent only a frac- 
tion of the nature and needs of youth. The world now 
demands what this country has never had, a man who, 
knowing the human body, gymnastic history, and the 
various great athletic traditions of the past, shall study 
anew the whole motor field, as a few great leaders early 
in the last century tried to do ; who shall gather and cor- 
relate the literature and experiences of the past and pres- 
ent with a deep sense of responsibility to the future; 
who shall examine martial training with all the in- 
spirations, warnings, and new demands; and who shall 
know how to revive the inspiration of the past animated 
by the same spirit as the Turners, who were almost in- 
flamed by referring back to the hardy life of the early 
Teutons and trying to reproduce its best features; who 
shall catch the spirit of, and make due connections with, 
popular sports past and present, study both industry 
and education to compensate their debilitating effects, 
and be himself animated by a great ethical and human- 
istic hope and faith in a better future. Such a man, if 
he ever walks the earth, will be the idol of youth, will 
know their physical secrets, will come almost as a savior 
to the bodies of men, and will, like Jahn, feel his calling 
and work sacred, and his institution a temple in which 
every physical act will be for the sake of the soul. The 
world of adolescence, especially that part which sits in 
closed spaces conning books, groans and travails all the 
more grievously and yearningly, because unconsciously, 
waiting for a redeemer for its body. Till he appears, our 
culture must remain for most a little hollow, falsetto, 
and handicapped by school-bred diseases. The modern 
gymnasium performs its chief service during adoles- 
cence and is one of the most beneficent agencies of which 

64 



GYMNASTICS 



not a few, but every youth, should make large use. Its 
spirit should be instinct with euphoria, where the joy of 
being alive reaches a point of high, although not quite its 
highest, intensity. "While the stimulus of rivalry and 
even of records is not excluded, and social feelings may 
be appealed to by unison exercises and by the club spirit, 
and while competitions, tournaments, and the artificial 
motives of prizes and exhibitions may be invoked, the 
culture is in fact largely individual. And yet in this 
country the annual Turnerfest brings 4,000 or 5,000 men 
from all parts of the Union, who sometimes all deploy 
and go through some of the standard exercises together 
under one leader. Instead of training a few athletes, 
the real problem now presented is how to raise the gen- 
eral level of vitality so that children and youth may be 
fitted to stand the strain of modern civilization, resist 
zymotic diseases, and overcome the deleterious influ- 
ences of city life. The almost immediate effects of sys- 
tematic training are surprising and would hardly be 
inferred from the annual increments tabled earlier in 
this chapter. Sandow was a rather weakly boy and 
ascribes his development chiefly to systematic training. 
We have space but for two reports believed to be 
typical. Enebuske reports on the effects of seven 
months' training on young women averaging 22.3 years. 
The figures are based on the 50 percentile column. 



Before training . . 
After six months . 



it 


C a 


%z 

cc o 


fl 




u 


2.65 

2.87 


93 
120 


65.5 
81.5 


27 
32 


26 

28 


23 
25 



HS 



230 
293 



By comparing records of what he deems standard 
normal growth with that of 188 naval cadets from six- 

65 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

teen to twenty-one, who had special and systematic train- 
ing, just after the period of most rapid growth in height, 
Beyer concluded that the effect of four years of this 
added a little over an inch of stature, and that this gain 
was greatest at the beginning. This increase was great- 
est for the youngest cadets. He found also a marked 
increase in weight, nearly the same for each year from 
seventeen to twenty-one. This he thought more easily 
influenced by exercise than height. A high vital index 
or ratio of lung capacity to weight is a very important 
attribute of good training. Beyer ^ found, however, that 
the addition of lung area gained by exercise did not keep 
up with the increase thus caused in muscular substance, 
and that the vital index always became smaller in those 
who had gained weight and strength by special physical 
training. How much gain in weight is desirable beyond 
the point where the lung capacity increases at an equal 
rate is unknown. If such measurements were applied to 
the different gymnastic systems, we might be able to com- 
pare their efficiency, which would be a great desideratum 
in view of the unfortunate rivalry between them. Total 
strength, too, can be greatly increased. Beyer thinks 
that from sixteen to twenty-one it may exceed the 
average or normal increment fivefold, and he adds, *' I 
firmly believe that the now so wonderful performances 
of most of our strong men are well within the reach of 
the majority of healthy men, if such performances were 
a serious enough part of their ambition to make them do 
the exercises necessary to develop them. ' ' Power of the 
organs to respond to good training by increased strength 
probably reaches well into middle life. 

1 See H. G. Beyer. The Influence of Exercise on Growth. American 
Physical Education Review, September-December, 1896, vol. 1, pp. 
76-87. 

66 



GYMNASTICS 

It is not encouraging to learn that, according to a 
recent writer,^ we now have seventy times as many 
physicians in proportion to the general population as 
there are physical directors, even for the school popula- 
tion alone considered. We have twice as many physi- 
cians per population as Great Britain, four times as 
many as Germany, or 2 physicians, 1.8 ministers, 1.4 
lawyers per thousand of the general population; while 
even if all male teachers of physical training taught only 
males of the military age, we should have but 0.05 of a 
teacher per thousand, or if the school population alone 
be considered, 20 teachers per million pupils. Hence, 
it is inferred that the need of wise and classified teachers 
in this field is at present greater than in any other. But 
fortunately while spontaneous, unsystematic exercise 
in a well-equipped modern gymnasium may in rare cases 
do harm, so far from sharing the prejudice often felt for 
it by professional trainers, we believe that free access to 
it without control or direction is unquestionably a boon 
to youth. Even if its use be sporadic and occasional, as 
it is likely to be with equal opportunity for out-of-door 
exercises and especially sports, practise is sometimes 
hygienic almost inversely to its amount, wiiile even 
lameness from initial excess has its lessons, and the 
sense of manifoldness of inferiorities brought home 
by experiences gives a w^holesome self-knowledge and 
stimulus. 

In this country more than elsewhere, especially in 
high school and college, gymnasium work has been 
brought into healthful connection with field sports and 
record competitions for both teams and individuals who 
aspire to championship. This has given the former a 

1 J. H. McCurdy, Physical Training as a Profession. Association 
Seminar, March, 1902, vol. 10, pp. 11-24. 

67 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

healthful stimulus although it is felt only by a picked 
few. Scores of records have been established for run- 
ning, walking, hurdling, throwing, putting, swimming, 
rowing, skating, etc., each for various shorter and longer 
distances and under manifold conditions, and for both 
amateurs and professionals, who are easily accessible. 
These, in general, show a slow but steady advance in this 
country since 1876, when athletics were established here. 
In that year there was not a single world's best record 
held by an American amateur, and high-school boys of 
to-day could in most, though not in all lines, have won 
the American championship twenty-five years ago. Of 
course, in a strict sense, intercollegiate contests do not 
show the real advance in athletics, because it is not 
necessary for a man in order to win a championship to do 
his best ; but they do show general improvement. 

We select for our purpose a few of those records long- 
est kept. Not dependent on external conditions like boat- 
racing, or on improved apparatus like bicycling, we have 
interesting data of a very different order for physical 
measurements. These down to present writing — July, 
1906 — are as follows: For the 100-yard dash, every 
annual record from 1876 to 1895 is 10 or 11 seconds, 
or between these, save in 1890, where Owen's record of 
9f seconds still stands. In the 220-yard run there is 
slight improvement since 1877, but here the record of 
1896 (Wefers, 21 -J seconds) has not been surpassed. 
In the quarter-mile run, the best record was in 1900 
(Long, 47 seconds). The half-mile record, which still 
stands, was made in 1895 (Kilpatrick, 1 minute 52| sec- 
onds) ; the mile run in 1895 (Conneff, 4 minutes 15| 
seconds). The running broad jump shows a very steady 
improvement, with the best record in 1900 (Prinstein, 
24 feet 7 J inches). The running high jump shows im- 

68 



GYMNASTICS 

provement, but less, with the record of 1895 still stand- 
ing (Sweeney, 6 feet 5| inches). The record for pole 
vaulting, corrected to November, 1905, is 12 feet Iff 
inches (Dole) ; for throwing the 16-pound hammer head, 
100 feet 5 inches (Queckberner) ; for putting the 16- 
pound shot, 49 feet 6 inches (Coe, 1905) ; the standing 
high jump, 5 feet 5J inches (Ew^ry) ; for the running 
high jump, 6 feet 5f inches (SweenejO- We also find 
that if w^e extend our purview to include all kinds of 
records for physical achievement, that not a few of the 
amateur records for activities involving strength com- 
bined with rapid rhythm movement are held by young 
men of twenty or even less. 

In putting the 16-pound shot under uniform condi- 
tions the record has improved since the early years nearly 
10 feet (Coe, 49 feet 6 inches, best at present writing, 
1906). Pole vaulting shows a very marked advance cul- 
minating in 1904 (Dole, 12 feet iU inches). Most 
marked of all perhaps is the great advance in throwing 
the 16-pound hammer. Beginning between 70 and 80 
feet in the early years, the record is now 172 feet 11 
inches (Flanagan, 1904). The two-mile bicycle race 
also shows marked gain, partly, of course, due to im- 
provement in the wheel, the early records being nearly 
7 minutes, and the best being 2 minutes 19 seconds 
(McLean, 1903). Some of these are world records, and 
more exceed professional records.^ These, of course, no 
more indicate general improvement than the steady re- 
duction of time in horse-racing suggests betterment in 
horses generally. 

1 These records are taken from the World Almanac, 1906, and 
Olympic Games of 1906 at Athens. Edited by J. E. Sullivan, Com- 
missioner from the United States to the Olympic Games. Spalding's 
Athletic Library, New Yor.k, Julv, 1906. 

69 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

In Panhellenic games as well as at present, athleti- 
cism in its manifold forms was one of the most character- 
istic expressions of adolescent nature and needs. Not a 
single time or distance record of antiquity has been pre- 
served, although Grasberger ^ and other writers would 
have us believe that in those that are comparable, ancient 
youthful champions greatly excelled ours, especially in 
leaping and running. While we are far from cultivating 
mere strength, our training is very one-sided from the 
Greek norm of unity or of the ideals that develop the 
body only for the sake of the soul. While gymnastics 
in our sense, with apparatus, exercises, and measure- 
ments independently of games was unknown, the ideal 
and motive were as different from ours as was its method. 
Nothing, so far as is known, was done for correcting the 
ravages of work, or for overcoming hereditary defects; 
and until athletics degenerated there were no exercises 
for the sole purpose of developing muscle. 

On the whole, while modern gymnastics has done 
more for the trunk, shoulders, and arms than for the 
legs, it is now too selfish and ego-centric, deficient on the 
side of psychic impulsion, and but little subordinated 
to ethical or intellectual development. Yet it does a 
great physical service to all who cultivate it, and is a 
safeguard of virtue and temperance. Its need is radical 
revision and coordination of various cults and theories 
in the light of the latest psycho-physiological science. 

Gymnastics allies itself to biometric work. The pres- 
ent academic zeal for physical development is in great 
need of closer affiliation with anthropometry. This im- 
portant and growing department will be represented in 

1 O. H. Jaeger, Die Gymnastik der Hellenen. Heitz, Stuttgart, 1881. 
L. Grasberger's great standard work, Erziehung und Untericht im klas- 
sischen Alterthum. Wiirzburg, 1864-81, 3 vols. 

70 



GYMNASTICS 

the ideal gymnasium of the future — First, by courses, 
if not by a chair, devoted to the apparatus of measure- 
ments of human proportions and symmetry, with a 
kinesological cabinet where young men are instructed in 
the elements of auscultation, the use of calipers, the 
sphygmograph, spirometer, plethysmograph, kinesometer 
to plot graphic curves, compute average errors, and 
tables of percentile grades and in statistical methods, 
etc. Second, anatomy, especially of muscles, bones, 
heart, and skin, will be taught, and also their physiology, 
with stress upon myology, the effects of exercise on the 
flow of blood and lymph, not excluding' the development 
of the upright position, and all that it involves and im- 
plies. Third, hygiene will be prominent and compre- 
hensive enough to cover all that pertains to body-keeping, 
regimen, sleep, connecting with school and domestic and 
public hygiene — all on the basis of modern as distinct 
from the archaic physiology of Ling, who, it is sufficient 
to remember, died in 1839, before this science was recre- 
ated, and the persistence of whose concepts are an 
anomalous survival to-day. Mechanieo-therapeutics, the 
purpose and service of each chief kind of apparatus and 
exercise, the value of work on stall bars with chest 
weights, of chinning, use of the quarter-staff, somer- 
saults, rings, clubs, dumb-bells, work with straight and 
flexed knees on machinery, etc., will be taught. Fourth, 
the history of gymnastics from the time of its highest 
development in Greece to the present is full of interest 
and has a very high and not yet developed culture value 
for youth. This department, both in its practical and 
theoretical side, should have its full share of prizes and 
scholarships to stimulate the seventy to seventy-five per 
cent of students who are now unaffected by the influence 
of athletics. By these methods the motivation of gymnas- 
6 71 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

tics, which now in large measure goes to waste in en- 
thusiasm, could be utilized to aid the greatly needed 
intellectualization of those exercises which in their nature 
are more akin to work than play. Indeed, Gutsmuths's 
first definition of athletics was " work under the garb 
of youthful pleasure." So to develop these courses 
that they could chiefly, if not entirely, satisfy the re- 
quirements for the A. B. degree, would coordinate the 
work of the now isolated curriculum of the training- 
schools with that of the college and thus broaden the 
sphere of the latter ; but besides its culture value, which 
I hold very high, 'such a step would prepare for the new, 
important, and, as we have seen, very inadequately 
manned profession of physical trainers. This has, more- 
over, great but yet latent and even unsuspected capaci- 
ties for the morals of our academic youth. Grote states 
that among the ancient Greeks one-half of all education 
was devoted to the body, and Galton urges that they as 
much excelled us as we do the African negro. They held 
that if physical perfection was cultivated, moral and 
mental excellence would follow; and that, without this, 
national culture rests on an insecure basis. In our day 
there are many new reasons to believe that the best 
nations of the future will be those which give most intel- 
ligent care to the body. 



72 



CHAPTER VI 

PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

The view of Groos partial and a better explanation of play proposed as 
rehearsing ancestral activities — The glory of Greek physical training, 
its ideals and results — The first spontaneous movements of infancy as 
keys to the past — Necessity of developing basal powers before those 
that are later and peculiar to the individual — Plays that interest due 
to their antiquity — Play with dolls — Play distinguished by age — Play 
preferences of children and their reasons — The profound significance 
of rhythm — The value of dancing and also its significance, history, 
and the desirability of re-introducing it — Fighting — Boxing — Wrest- 
ling — Bushido — Foot-ball — Military ideals — Showing off — Cold baths 
— HiU climbing — The playground movement — The psychology of play 
— Its relation to work. 

Play, sports, and games constitute a more varied, far 
older, and more popular field. Here a very different 
spirit of joy and gladness rules. Artifacts often enter 
but can not survive unless based upon pretty purely 
hereditary momentum. Thus our first problem is to seek 
both the motor tendencies and the psychic motives be- 
queathed to us from the past. The view of Groos that 
play is practise for future adult activities is very par- 
tial, superficial, and perverse. It ignores the past where 
lie the keys to all play activities. True play never 
practises what is phyletically new; and this, industrial 
life often calls for. It exercises many atavistic and rudi- 
mentary functions, a number of which will abort before 
maturity, but which live themselves out in play like the 
tadpole's tail, that must be both developed and used 
as a stimulus to the gro\\i;h of legs which will otherwise 
never mature. In place of this mistaken and mislead- 

73 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

ing view, I regard play as the motor habits and spirit 
of the past of the race, persisting in the present, as 
rudimentary functions sometimes of and always akin 
to rudimentary organs. The best index and guide to 
the stated activities of adults in past ages is found in 
the instinctive, untaught, and non-imitative plays of 
children which are the most spontaneous and exact ex- 
pressions of their motor needs. The young grow up 
into the same forms of motor activity, as did genera- 
tions that have long preceded them, only to a limited 
extent ; and if the form of every human occupation were 
to change to-day, play would be unaffected save in some 
of its superficial imitative forms. It would develop the 
motor capacities, impulses, and fundamental forms of 
our past heritage, and the transformation of these into 
later acquired adult forms is progressively later. In play 
every mood and movement is instinct with heredity. 
Thus we rehearse the activities of our ancestors, back 
we know not how far, and repeat their life work in 
summative and adumbrated ways. It is reminiscent, 
albeit unconsciously, of our line of descent; and each is 
the key to the other. The psycho-motive impulses that 
prompt it are the forms in which our forebears have 
transmitted to us their habitual activities. Thus stage 
by stage we reenact their lives. Once in the phylon 
many of these activities were elaborated in the life and 
death struggle for existence. Now the elements and com- 
binations oldest in the muscle history of the race are re- 
represented earliest in the individual, and those later fol- 
low in order. This is why the heart of youth goes out into 
play as into nothing else, as if in it man remembered 
a lost paradise, This is why, unlike gymnastics, play 
has as much soul as body, and also why it so makes for 
unity of body and soul that the proverb ' ' Man is whole 

74 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

only when he plays " suggests that the purest plays are 
those that enlist both alike. To address the body pre- 
dominantly strengthens unduly the fleshy elements, 
and to overemphasize the soul causes weakness and 
automatisms. Thus understood, play is the ideal type 
of exercise for the young, most favorable for growth, 
and most self-regulating in both kind and amount. For 
its forms the pulse of adolescent enthusiasm beats 
highest. It is unconstrained and free to follow any 
outer or inner impulse. The zest of it vents and satisfies 
the strong passion of youth for intense erethic and per- 
haps orgiastic states, gives an exaltation of self-feeling 
so craved that with no vicarious outlet it often impels 
to drink, and best of all realizes the watchword of the 
Turners,^ frisch, frei, frohlich^ fromm. 

Ancient Greece, the history and literature of which 
owe their perennial charm for all later ages to the fact 
that they represent the eternal adolescence of the world, 
best illustrates what this enthusiasm means for youth. 
Jager and Guildersleeve, and yet better Grasberger, 
would have us believe that the Panhellenic and especially 
the Olympic games combined many of the best features 
of a modern prize exhibition, a camp-meeting, fair, 
Derby day, a Wagner festival, a meeting of the British 
Association, a country cattle show, intercollegiate games, 
and medieval tournament ; that they were the ' ' acme of 
festive life " and drew all who loved gold and glory, 
and that night and death never seemed so black as by 
contrast with their splendor. The deeds of the young 
athletes were ascribed to the inspiration of the gods, 
whose abodes they lit up with glory ; and in doing them 
honor these discordant states found a bond of unity. 

1 Fresh, free, jovial, pious. 

75 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

The victor was crowned with a simple spray of laurel; 
cities vied with each other for the honor of having given 
him birth, their walls were taken down for his entry 
and immediately rebuilt; sculptors, for whom the five 
ancient games were schools of posture, competed in the 
representation of his form; poets gave him a pedigree 
reaching back to the gods, and Pindar, who sang that 
only he is great who is great with his hands and feet, 
raised his victory to symbolize the eternal prevalence 
of good over evil. The best body implied the best mind ; 
and even Plato, to whom tradition gives not only one 
of the fairest souls, but a body remarkable for both 
strength and beauty, and for whom weakness was peri- 
lously near to wickedness, and ugliness to sin, argues 
that education must be so conducted that the body can 
be safely entrusted to the care of the soul and suggests, 
what later became a slogan of a more degenerate gladi- 
atorial athleticism, that to be well and strong is to 
be a philosopher — valare est philosophari. The Greeks 
could hardly conceive bodily apart from psychic educa- 
tion, and physical was for the sake of mental training. 
A sane, whole mind could hardly reside in an unsound 
body upon the integrity of which it was dependent. 
Knowledge for its own sake, from this standpoint, is a 
dangerous superstition, for what frees the mind is dis- 
astrous if it does not give self-control ; better ignorance 
than knowledge that does not develop a motor side. 
Body culture is ultimately only for the sake of the mind 
and soul, for body is only its other ego. Not only is 
all muscle culture at the same time brain-building, but 
a book-worm with soft hands, tender feet, and tough 
rump from much sitting, or an anemic girl prodigy, * ' in 
the morning hectic, in the evening electric," is a mon- 
ster. Play at its best is only a school of ethics. It gives 

76 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

not only strength but courage and confidence, tends 
to simplify life and habits, gives energy, decision, 
and promptness to the will, brings consolation and peace 
of mind in evil days, is a resource in trouble and brings 
out individuality. 

How the ideals of physical preformed those of moral 
and mental training in the land and day of Socrates is 
seen in the identification of knowledge and virtue, 
** Kennen und Konnen.^'^ Only an extreme and one- 
sided intellectualism separates them and assumes that it 
is easy to know and hard to do. From the ethical stand- 
point, philosophy, and indeed all knowledge, is the art 
of being and doing good, conduct is the only real sub- 
ject of knowledge, and there is no science but morals. 
He is the best man, says Xenophon, who is always study- 
ing how to improve, and he is the happiest who feels 
that he is improving. Life is a skill, an art like a 
handicraft, and true knowledge a form of will. Good 
moral and physical development are more than analo- 
gous; and where intelligence is separated from action 
the former becomes mystic, abstract, and desiccated, 
and the latter formal routine. Thus mere conscience 
and psychological integrity and righteousness are allied 
and mutually inspiring. 

Not only play, which is the purest expression of 
motor heredity, but work and all exercise owe most of 
whatever pleasure they bring to the past. The first 
influence of all right exercise for those in health is a 
feeling of well-being and exhilaration. This is one chief 
source of the strange enthusiasm felt for many special 
forms of activity, and the feeling is so strong that it 
animates many forms of it that are hygienically unfit. 

1 To know and to have the power to do. 

77 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

To act vigorously from a full store of energy gives a 
reflex of pleasure that is sometimes a passion and may 
fairly intoxicate. Animals must move or cease grow- 
ing and die. While to be weak is to be miserable, to feel 
strong is a joy and glory. It gives a sense of superior- 
ity, dignity, endurance, courage, confidence*, enterprise, 
power, personal validity, virility, and virtue in the 
etymological sense of that noble word. To be active, 
agile, strong, is especially the glory of young men. Our 
nature and history have so disposed our frame that thus 
all physiological and psychic processes are stimulated, 
products of decomposition are washed out by oxygena- 
tion and elimination, the best reaction of all the gangli- 
onic and sympathetic activities is aroused, and vegetative 
processes are normalized. Activity may exalt the spirit 
almost to the point of ecstasy, and the physical pleasure 
of it diffuse, irradiate, and mitigate the sexual stress 
just at the age when its premature localization is most 
deleterious. Just enough at the proper time and rate 
contributes to permanent elasticity of mood and disposi- 
tion, gives moral self-control, rouses a love of freedom 
with all that that great word means, and favors all 
higher human aspirations. 

In all these modes of developing our efferent powers, 
we conceive that the race comes very close to the in- 
dividual youth, and that ancestral momenta animate 
motor neurons and muscles and preside over most of the 
combinations. Some of the elements speak with a still 
small voice raucous with age. The first spontaneous 
movements of infancy are hieroglyphs, to most of which 
we have as yet no good key. Many elements are so 
impacted and felted together that w^e can not analyze 
them. Many are extinct and many perhaps made but 
once and only hint things we can not apprehend. Later 

78 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

the rehearsals are fuller, and their significance more in- 
telligible, and in boyhood and youth the correspondences 
are plain to all who have eyes to see. Pleasure is always 
exactly proportional to the directness and force of the 
current of heredity, and in play we feel most fully and 
intensely ancestral joys. The pain of toil died with 
our forebears ; its vestiges in our play give pure delight. 
Its variety prompts to diversity that enlarges our life. 
Primitive men and animals played, and that too has 
left its traces in us. Some urge that work was evolved 
or degenerated from play; but the play field broadens 
as with succeeding generations youth is prolonged, for 
play is always and everywhere the best synonym of 
youth. All are young at play and only in play, and 
the best possible characterization of old age is the ab- 
sence of the soul and body of play. Only senile and 
overspecialized tissues of brain, heart, and muscles know 
it not. 

Gulick ^ has urged that what makes certain exercises 
more interesting than others is to be found in the phylon. 
The power to throw with accuracy and speed was once 
pivotal for survival, and non-throwers were eliminated. 
Those who could throw unusually well best overcame 
enemies, killed game, and sheltered family. The ner- 
vous and muscular systems are organized with certain 
definite tendencies and have back of them a racial set- 
ting. So running and dodging with speed and endur- 
ance, and hitting with a club, were also basal to hunting 
and fighting. Now that the need of these is less urgent 
for utilitarian purposes, they are still necessary for per- 
fecting the organism. This makes, for instance, base- 
ball racially familiar, because it represents activities 

1 Interest in Relation to Muscular Exercise. American Physical 
Education Review, June, 1902, vol. 7, pp. 57-65. 

79 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

that were once and for a long time necessary for sur- 
vival. We inherit tendencies of muscular coordination 
that have been of great racial utility. The best athletic 
sports and games are composed of these racially old 
elements, so that phylogenetic muscular history is of 
great importance. Why is it, this writer asks, that a 
city man so loves to sit all day and fish? It is because 
this interest dates back to time immemorial. We are 
the sons of fishermen, and early life was by the water's 
side, and this is our food supply. This explains why 
certain exercises are more interesting than others. It 
is because they touch and revive the deep basic emo- 
tions of the race. Thus we see that play is not doing 
things to be useful later, but it is rehearsing racial 
history. Plays and games change only in their ex- 
ternal form, but the underlying neuro-muscular activi- 
ties, and also the psychic content of them, are the same. 
Just as psychic states must be lived out up through the 
grades, so the physical activities must be played off, 
each in its own time. 

The best exercise for the young should thus be more 
directed to develop the basal powers old to the race than 
those peculiar to the individual, and it should enforce 
those psycho-neural and muscular forms which race 
habit has handed down rather than insist upon those ar- 
bitrarily designed to develop our ideas of symmetry 
regardless of heredity. The best guide to the former 
is interest, zest, and spontaneity. Hereditary momenta 
really determine, too, the order in which nerve centers 
come into function. The oldest, racial parts come first, 
and those which are higher and represent volition come 
in much later. ^ As Hughlings Jacl^on has well shown, 

1 The Influence of Exercise upon Growth, by Frederic Burk. Ameri- 
can Physical Education Review, December, 1899, vol. 4, pp. 340-349. 

80 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

speech uses most of the same organs as does eating, but 
those concerned with the former are controlled from a 
higher level of nerve-cells. By right mastication, deg- 
lutition, etc., we are thus developing speech organs. 
Thus not only the kind but the time of forms and de- 
grees of exercise is best prescribed by heredity. All 
growth is more or less rhythmic. There are seasons of 
rapid increment followed by rest and then perhaps suc- 
ceeded by a period of augmentation, and this may oc- 
cur several times. Roberts's fifth parliamentary report 
shows that systematic gymnastics, which, if applied at 
the right age, produce such immediate and often sur- 
prising development of lung capacity, utterly fail with 
boys of twelve, because this nascent period has not yet 
come. Donaldson showed that if the eyelid of a young 
kitten be forced open prematurely at birth and stimu- 
lated with light, medullation was premature and im- 
perfect; so, too, if proper exercise is deferred too long, 
we know that little result is achieved. The sequence 
in which the maturation of levels, nerve areas, and 
bundles of fibers develop may be, as Flechsig thinks, 
causal; or, according to Cajal, energy, originally em- 
ployed in gro^vth by cell division, later passes to fiber 
extension and the development of latent cells; or, as 
in young children, the nascent period of finger move- 
ments may stimulate that of the thumb which comes 
later, and the independent movement of the two eyes, 
their subsequent coordination, and so on to perhaps a 
third and yet higher level. Thus exercise ought to de- 
velop nature's first intention and fulfil the law of 
nascent periods, or else not only no good but great 
harm may be done. Hence every determination of these 
periods is of great practical as well as scientific im- 
portance. The following are the chief attempts yet 

81 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

made to fix them, which show the significance of adoles- 
cence. 

The doll curve reaches its point of highest intensity 
between eight and nine/ and it is nearly ended at fif- 
teen, although it may persist. Children can give no 
better reason why they stop playing with dolls than 
because other things are liked better, or they are too 
old, ashamed, love real babies, etc. The Roman girl, 
when ripe for marriage, hung up her childhood doll 
as a votive offering to Venus. Mrs. Carlyle, who was 
compelled to stop, made sumptuous dresses and a four- 
post bed, and made her doll die upon a funeral pyre 
like Dido, after speaking her last farewell and stab- 
bing herself with a penknife by way of Tyrian sword. 
At thirteen or fourteen it is more distinctly realized 
that dolls are not real, because they have no inner life 
or feeling, yet many continue to play with them with 
great pleasure, in secret, till well on in the teens or 
twenties. Occasionally single women or married women 
with no children, and in rare cases even those who have 
children, play dolls all their lives. Gales 's^ student 
concluded that the girls who played with dolls up to 
or into pubescent years were usually those who had 
the fewest number, that they played with them in the 
most realistic manner, kept them because actually most 
fond of them, and were likely to be more scientific, 
steady, and less sentimental than those who dropped 
them early. But the instinct that " dollifies " new or 
most unfit things is gone, as also the subtle points of 
contact between doll play and idolatry. Before puberty 



1 A study of Dolls, by G. Stanley Hall and A. C. Ellis. Pedagogical 
Seminary, December, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 129-175. 

2 Studies in Imagination, by Lillian H. Chalmers. Pedagogical 
Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 111-123. 

«9 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

dolls are more likely to be adults; after puberty they 
are almost always children or babies. There is no 
longer a struggle between doubt and reality in the doll 
cosmos, no more abandon to the doll illusion ; but where 
it lingers it is a more atavistic rudiment, and just as 
at the height of the fever dolls are only in small part 
representatives of future children, the saying that the 
first child is the last doll is probably false. Nor are 
doll and child comparable to first and second dentition, 
and it is doubtful if children who play with dolls as 
children with too great abandonment are those who 
make the best mothers later, or if it has any value as 
a preliminary practise of motherhood. The number of 
motor activities that are both inspired and unified by 
this form of play and that can always be given whole- 
some direction is almost incredible, and has been too 
long neglected both by psychologists and teachers. Few 
purer types of the rehearsal by the individual of the 
history of the race can probably be found even though 
we can not yet analyze the many elements involved and 
assign to each its phyletic correlate. 

In an interesting paper Dr. Gulick ^ divides play 
into three childish periods, separated by the ages three 
and seven, and attempts to characterize the plays of 
early adolescence from twelve to seventeen and of later 
adolescence from seventeen to twenty-three. Of the first 
two periods he says, children before seven rarely play 
games spontaneously, but often do so under the stimulus 
of older persons. From seven to twelve, games are al- 
most exclusively individualistic and competitive, but in 
early adolescence ' ' two elements predominate — first, the 
plays are predominantly team games, in which the in- 

1 Some Psychical Aspects of Physical Exercise. Popxilar Science 
Monthly, October, 1898, vol. 53, pp. 793-805. 

83 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

dividual is more or less sacrificed for the whole, in which 
there is obedience to a captain, in which there is 
cooperation among a number for a given end, in which 
play has a program and an end. The second character- 
istic of the period is with reference to its plays, and there 
seems to be all of savage out-of-door life — ^hunting, 
fishing, stealing, swimming, rowing, sailing, fighting, 
hero-worship, adventure, love of animals, etc. This char- 
acteristic obtains more with boys than with girls." 
" The plays of adolescence are socialistic, demanding 
the heathen virtues of courage, endurance, self-control, 
bravery, loyalty, enthusiasm." 

Croswell ^ found that among 2,000 children familiar 
with 700 kinds of amusements, those involving physical 
exercises predominated over all others, and that " at 
every age after the eighth year they were represented 
as almost two to one, and in the sixteenth year rose 
among boys as four to one." The age of the greatest 
number of different amusements is from ten to eleven, 
nearly fifteen being mentioned, but for the next eight 
or nine years there is a steady decline of number, and 
progressive specialization occurs. The games of chase, 
which are suggestive on the recapitulation theory, rise 
from eleven per cent in boys of six to nineteen per cent 
at nine, but soon after decline, and at sixteen have fallen 
to less than four per cent. Toys and original make- 
believe games decline still earlier, while ball rises stead- 
ily and rapidly to eighteen, and card and table games 
rise very steadily from ten to fifteen in girls, but the 
increment is much less in boys. '' A third or more of 
all the amusements of boys just entering their teens are 
games of contest — games in which the end is in one way 

1 Amusements of Worcester School Children. Pedagogical Seminary, 
September, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 314-371. 

84 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

or another to gain an advantage over one's fellows, in 
which the interest is in the struggle between peers. '^ 
* * As children approach the teens, a tendency arises that 
is well expressed by one of the girls who no longer 
makes playthings but things that are useful." Parents 
and society must, therefore, provide the most favorable 
conditions for the kind of amusement fitting at each 
age. As the child grows older, society plays a larger role 
in all the child's amusements, and from the thirteenth 
year '' amusements take on a decidedly cooperative and 
competitive character, and efforts are more and more 
confined to the accomplishments of some definite aim. 
The course for this period will concentrate the effort 
upon fewer lines," and more time will be devoted to 
each. The desire for mastery is now at its height. The 
instinct is to maintain one's self independently and ask 
no odds. At fourteen, especially, the impulse is, in 
manual training, to make something and perhaps to 
cooperate. 

McGhee ^ collected the play preferences of 15,718 
children, and found a very steady decline in running 
plays among girls from nine to eighteen, but a far more 
rapid rise in plays of chance from eleven to fifteen, and 
a very rapid rise from sixteen to eighteen. From eleven 
onward with the most marked fall before fourteen, there 
was a distinct decline in imitative games for girls and a 
slower one for boys. Games involving rivalry increased 
rapidly among boys from eleven to sixteen and still more 
rapidly among girls, their percentage of preference even 
exceeding that of boys at eighteen, when it reached near- 
ly seventy per cent. With adolescence, specialization 



1 A study in the Plaj^ Life of Some South Carolina Children. Peda- 
gogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 459-478. 

85 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

upon a few plays was markedly increased in the teens 
among boys, whereas with girls in general there were a 
large number of plays which were popular with none 
preeminent. Even at this age the principle of organi- 
zation in games so strong with boys is very slight with 
girls. Puberty showed the greatest increase of interest 
among pubescent girls for croquet, and among boys for 
swimming, although baseball and football, the most 
favored for boys, rose rapidly. Although the author 
does not state it, it would seem from his data that plays 
peculiar to the different seasons were most marked 
among boys, in part, at least, because their activities are 
more out of doors. 

Ferrero and others have shown that the more intense 
activities of primitive people tend to be rhythmic and 
with strongly automatic features. No form of activity 
is more universal than the dance, which is not only in- 
tense but may express chiefly in terms of fundamental 
movements, stripped of their accessory finish and detail, 
every important act, vocation, sentiment, or event in the 
life of man in language so universal and symbolic that 
music and poetry themselves seem to have arisen out of 
it. Before it became specialized much labor was cast in 
rhythmic form and often accompanied by time-marking 
and even tone to secure the stimulus of concert on both 
economic and social principles. In the dark background 
of history there is now much evidence that at some point, 
play, art, and work were not divorced. They all may 
have sprung from rhythmic movement which is so deep- 
seated in biology because it secures most joy of life with 
least expense. By it Eros of old ordered chaos, and by 
its judicious use the human soul is cadenced to great 
efforts toward high ideals. The many work-songs to 
secure concerted action in lifting, pulling, stepping, the 

86 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

use of flail, lever, saw, ax, hammer, hoe, loom, etc., show 
that arsis and thesis represent flexion and extension, that 
accent originated in the acme of muscular stress, as well 
as how rhythm eases work and also makes it social. 
Most of the old work-canticles are lost, and machines 
have made work more serial, while rhythms are obscured 
or imposed from without so as to limit the freedom they 
used to express. Now all basal, central, or strength 
movements tend to be oscillatory, automatically repeti- 
tive, or rhythmic like savage music, as if the waves of the 
primeval sea whence we came still beat in them, just as 
all fine peripheral and late movements tend to be serial, 
special, vastly complex, and diversified. It is thus nat- 
ural that during the period of greatest strength incre- 
ment in muscular development, the rhythmic function of 
nearly all fundamental movements should be strongly ac- 
centuated. At the dawn of this age boys love marching; 
and, as our returns show, there is a very remarkable rise 
in the passion for beating time, jigging, double shuffling, 
rhythmic clapping, etc. The more prominent the factor 
of repetition the more automatic and the less strenuous is 
the hard and new effort of constant psychic adjustment 
and attention. College yells, cheers, rowing, marching, 
processions, bicycling, running, tug-of-war, calisthenics 
and class gymnastics with counting, and especially with 
music, horseback riding, etc., are rhythmic ; tennis, base- 
ball and football, basket-ball, golf, polo, etc., are less 
rhythmic, but are concerted and intense. These latter 
emphasize the conflict factor, best brought out in fencing, 
boxing, and wrestling, and lay more stress on the psychic 
elements of attention and skill. ' The effect of musical 
accompaniment, which the Swedish system wrongly re- 
jects, is to make the exercises more fundamental and 
automatic, and to proportionately diminish the conscious 
7 87 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

effort and relieve the neuro-muscular mechanism in- 
volved in fine movements. 

Adolescence is the golden period of nascency for 
rhythm. Before this change many children have a very 
imperfect sense of it, and even those who march, sing, 
play, or read poetry with correct and overemphasized 
time marking, experience a great broadening of the hori- 
zon of consciousness, and a marked, and, for mental pow- 
er and scope, all-conditioning increase in the carrying 
power of attention and the sentence-sense. The soul now 
feels the beauty of cadences, good ascension, and the sym- 
metry of well-developed periods — and all, as I am con- 
vinced, because this is the springtime of the strength 
movements which are predominantly rhythmic. Not only 
does music start in time marking, the drum being the old- 
est instrument, but quantity long took precedence of sense 
and form of content, both melody and words coming later. 
Even rhythmic tapping or beating of the foot (whence 
the poetic feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed 
on monotonous prose to make poetry) exhilarates, makes 
glad the soul and inspires it to attack, gives compulsion 
and a sense of unity. The psychology of rhythm shows 
its basal value in cadencing the soul. We can not con- 
ceive what war, love, and religion would be without it. 
The old adage that " the parent of prose is poetry, the 
parent of poetry is music, the parent of music is rhythm, 
and the parent of rhj^thm is God " seems borne out not 
only in history, but by the nature of thought and atten- 
tion that does not move in a continuum, but flies and 
perches alternately, or on stepping-stones and as if in- 
fluenced by the tempo of the leg swinging as a compound 
pendulum. 

Dancing is one of the best expressions of pure play 
and of the motor needs of youth. Perhaps it is the most 

88 



^ 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

liberal of all forms of motor education. Schopenhauer 
thought it the apex of physiological irritability and that 
it made animal life most vividly conscious of its existence 
and most exultant in exhibiting it. In very ancient 
times China ritualized it in the spring and made it a 
large part of the education of boys after the age of thir- 
teen. Neale thinks it was originally circular or orbicu- 
lar worship, which he deems oldest. In Japan, in the 
priestly Salic College of ancient Rome, in Egypt, in the 
Greek Apollo cult, it was a form of worship. St. Basil 
advised it; St. Gregory introduced it into religious ser- 
vices. The early Christian bishops, called pra?suls, led 
the sacred dance around the altar ; and only in 692, and 
again in 1617, was it forbidden in church. Neale and 
others have shown how the choral processionals with all 
the added charm of vestment and intonation have had 
far more to do in Christianizing many low tribes, who 
could not understand the language of the church, than 
has preaching. Savages are nearly all great dancers, imi- 
tating every animal they know, dancing out their own 
legends, with ritual sometimes so exacting that error 
means death. The character of people is often learned 
from their dances, and Moliere says the destiny of nations 
depends on them. The gayest dancers are often among 
the most downtrodden and unhappy people. Some mys- 
teries can be revealed only in them, as holy passion-plays. 
If we consider the history of secular dances, we find that 
some of them, when first invented or in vogue, evoked 
the greatest enthusiasm. One writer says that the polka 
so delighted France and England that statesmen forgot 
politics. The spirit of the old Polish aristocracy still 
lives in the polonaise. The gipsy dances have inspired 
a new school of music. The Greek drama grew out of 
the evolution of the tragic chorus. National dances like 

89 



YOUTH : ITS EQUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

the hornpipe and reel of Scotland, the Reihen of Ger- 
many, the rondes of France, the Spanish tarantella and 
cliaconne, the stratlispey from the Spey Valley, the Irish 
jig, etc., express racial traits. Instead of the former 
vast repertory, the stately pavone, the graceful and dig- 
nified saraband, the wild salterrelle, the bourree with 
song and strong rh5i:hm, the light and skippy bolero, the 
courtly bayadere, the dramatic plugge, gavotte, and 
other peasant dances in costume, the fast and furious 
fandango, weapon and military dances; in place of the 
pristine power to express love, mourning, justice, pen- 
alty, fear, anger, consolation, divine service, symbolic 
and philosophical conceptions, and every industry or 
characteristic act of life in pantomime and gesture, we 
have in the dance of the modern ballroom only a degen- 
erate relict, with at best but a very insignificant culture 
value, and too often stained with bad associations. This 
is most unfortunate for youth, and for their sake a work 
of rescue and revival is greatly needed ; for it is perhaps, 
not excepting even music, the completest language of the 
emotions and can be made one of the best schools of sen- 
timent and even will, inculcating good states of mind and 
exorcising bad ones as few other agencies have power to 
do. ' Right dancing can cadence the very soul, give ner- 
vous poise and control, bring harmony between basal and 
finer muscles, and also between feeling and intellect, 
body and mind. It can serve both as an awakener and 
a test of intelligence, predispose the heart against vice, 
and turn the springs of character toward virtue.^/ That 
its present decadent forms, for those too devitalized to 
dance aright, can be demoralizing, we know in this day 
too well, although even questionable dances may some- 
times work off vicious propensities in ways more harm- 
less than those in which they would otherwise find vent. 

90 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

Its utilization for and influence on the insane would be 
another interesting chapter. 

Very interesting scientifically and suggestive practi- 
cally is another correspondence which I believe to be 
new, between the mode of spontaneous activity in youth 
and that of labor in the early history of the race. One 
of the most marked distinctions between savage and 
civilized races is in the longer rhythm of work and relax- 
ation. The former are idle and lazy for days, weeks, 
and perhaps months, and then put forth intense and pro- 
longed effort in dance, hunt, warfare, migration, or 
construction, sometimes dispensing with sleep and mani- 
festing remarkable endurance. As civilization and spe- 
cialization advance, hours become regular. The cultured 
man is less desultory in all his habits, from eating and 
sleeping to performing social and religious duties, al- 
though he may put forth no more aggregate energy in a 
year than the savage. Women are schooled to regular 
work long before men, and the difficulty of imposing 
civilization upon low races is compared by Biicher ^ to 
that of training a cat to work when harnessed to a dog- 
cart. It is not dread of fatigue but of the monotony of 
method that makes them hate labor. The effort of sav- 
ages is more intense and their periods of rest more pro- 
longed and inert. Darwin thinks all vital function 
bred to go in periods, as vertebrates are descended from 
a tidal ascidian.^ There is indeed much that suggests some 
other irregular rhythm more or less independent of day 
and night, and perhaps sexual in its nature, but not lunar, 
and for males. This mode of life not only preceded the 
industrial and commercial period of which regularity is a 

1 Arbeit und Rythmus. Triibner, Leipzig, 1896. 

2 Descent of Man. D. Appleton and Co., 1872, vol. 1, chap, vi, p. 204 
et seq. 

91 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

prime condition, but it lasted indefinitely longer than the 
latter has yet existed ; during this early time great exer- 
tion, sometimes to the point of utter exhaustion and col- 
lapse, alternated with seasons of almost vegetative exist- 
ence. We see abundant traces of this psychosis in the 
muscle habits of adolescents, and, I think, in student and 
particularly in college life, which can enforce regularity 
only to a limited extent. This is not reversion, but partly 
an expression of the nature and perhaps the needs of this 
stage of immaturity, and partly the same instinct of re- 
volt against uniformity imposed from without, which rob 
life of variety and extinguish the spirit of adventure and 
untrammeled freedom, and make the savage hard to break 
to the harness of civilization. The hunger for fatigue, 
too, can become a veritable passion and is quite distinct 
from either the impulse for activity for its own sake or 
the desire of achievement. To shout and put forth the 
utmost possible strength in crude ways is an erethic 
intoxication at a stage when every tissue can become 
erectile and seems, like the crying of infants, to have a 
legitimate function in causing tension and flushing, en- 
larging the caliber of blood vessels, and forcing the blood 
perhaps even to the point of extravasation to irrigate 
newly growing fibers, cells, and organs which atrophy 
if not thus fed. When maturity is complete this need 
abates. If this be correct, the phenomenon of second 
breath, so characteristic of adolescence, and one factor in 
the inebriate's propensity, is an ontogenetic expression 
of a rhythm trait of a long racial period. Y^outh needs 
overexertion to compensate for underexertion, to under- 
sleep in order to offset oversleep at times. This seems to 
be nature's provision to expand in all directions its possi- 
bilities of the body and soul in this plastic period when, 
without this occasional excess, powers would atrophy or 

92 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

suffer arrest for want of use, or larger possibilities would 
not be realized without this regimen peculiar to nascent 
periods. This is treated more fully elsewhere. 

Perhaps next to dancing in phyletic motivation come 
personal conflicts, such as wrestling, fighting, boxing, 
dueling, and in some sense, hunting. The animal world 
is full of struggle for survival, and primitive warfare is 
a wager of battle, of personal combat of foes contesting 
eye to eye and hand to hand, where victory of one is 
the defeat and perhaps death of the other, and where life 
is often staked against life. In its more brutal forms 
we see one of the most degrading of all the aspects of 
human nature. Burk ^ has shown how the most bestial 
of these instincts survive and crop out irresistibly in boy- 
hood, where fights are often engaged in with desperate 
abandon. Noses are bitten, ears torn, sensitive places 
kicked, hair pulled, arms twisted, the head stamped on 
and pounded on stones, fingers twisted, and hoodlums 
sometimes deliberately try to strangle, gouge out an eye, 
pull off an ear, pull out the tongue, break teeth, nose, or 
bones, or dislocate jaws or other joints, wring the neck, 
bite off a lip, and torture in utterly nameless ways. In un- 
restrained anger, man becomes a demon in love with the 
blood of his victim. The face is distorted, and there are 
yells, oaths, animal snorts and grunts, cries, and then ex- 
ultant laughter at pain, and each is bruised, dirty, dishev- 
eled and panting with exhaustion. For coarser natures, 
the spectacle of such conflicts has an intense attraction, 
while some morbid souls are scarred by a distinct phobia 
for everything suggestive of even lower degrees of opposi- 
tion. These instincts, more or less developed in boyhood. 



^ Teasing and Bullying. Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1897, vol. 
4, pp. 336-371. 

93 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

are repressed in normal cases before strength and skill 
are sufficiently developed to inflict serious bodily in- 
jury, while without the reductives that orthogenetic 
growth brings they become criminal. Repulsive as are 
these grosser and animal manifestations of anger, its im- 
pulsion can not and should not be eliminated, but its ex- 
pression transformed and directed toward evils that need 
all its antagonism. To be angry aright is a good part 
of moral education, and non-resistance under all provo- 
cations is unmanly, craven, and cowardly.^ An able- 
bodied young man, who can not fight physically, can 
hardly have a high and true sense of honor, and is gen- 
erally a milk-sop, a lady-boy, or a sneak. He lacks 
virility, his masculinity does not ring true, his hon- 
esty can not be sound to the core. Hence, instead of 
eradicating this instinct, one of the great problems of 
physical and moral pedagogy is rightly to temper and 
direct it. 

Sparta sedulously cultivated it in boys; and in the 
great English schools, w^here for generations it has been 
more or less tacitly recognized, it is regulated by custom, 
and their literature and traditions abound in illustra- 
tions of its man-making and often transforming influ- 
ence in ways well appreciated by Hughes and Arnold. 
It makes against degeneration, the essential feature of 
which is weakening of will and loss of honor. Real vir- 
tue requires enemies, and women and effeminate and 
old men want placid, comfortable peace, while a real man 
rejoices in noble strife which sanctifies all great causes, 
casts out fear, and is the chief school of courage. Bad as 
is overpugnacity, a scrapping boy is better than one who 



1 See my Study of Anger. American Journal of Psychology, July, 
1899, vol. 10, pp. 516-591. 

94 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

funks a fight, and I have no patience with the sentimental- 
ity that would here ' ' pour out the child with the bath, ' ' 
but would have every healthy boy taught boxing at ado- 
lescence if not before. The prize-ring is degrading and 
brutal, but in lieu of better illustrations of the spirit of 
personal contest I would interest a certain class of boys 
in it and try to devise modes of pedagogic utilization of 
the immense store of interest it generates. Like dancing 
it should be rescued from its evil associations, and its 
educational force put to do moral work, even though it 
be by way of individual prescriptions for specific defects 
of character. At its best, it is indeed a manly art, a su- 
perb school for quickness of eye and hand, decision, 
force of will, and self-control. The moment this is lost 
stinging punishment follows. Hence it is the surest of 
all cures for excessive irascibility and has been found to 
have a most beneficent effect upon a peevish or unmanly 
disposition. It has no mean theoretic side, of rules, kinds 
of blow and counters, arts of drawing out and tiring an 
opponent, hindering but not injuring him, defensive and 
offensive tactics, etc., and it addresses chiefly the funda- 
mental muscles in both training and conflict. I do not 
underestimate the many and great difficulties of proper 
purgation, but I know from both personal practise and 
observation that they are not unconquerable. 

This form of personal conflict is better than dueling 
even in its comparatively harmless German student form, 
although this has been w^armly defended by Jacob 
Grimm, Bismarck, and Treitschke, while Paulsen, Pro- 
fessor of Philosophy and Pedagogy, and Schrempf, of 
Theology, have pronounced it but a slight evil, and sev- 
eral Americans have thought it better than hazing, which 
it makes impossible. The dark side of dueling is seen in 
the hypertrophied sense of honor which under the code 

95 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

of the corps becomes an intricate and fantastic thing, 
prompting, according to Ziegler,^ a club of sixteen 
students to fight over two hundred duels in four weeks 
in Jena early in this century. It is prone to degenerate 
to an artificial etiquette demanding satisfaction for 
slight and unintended offenses. Although this profess- 
or, who had his own face scarred on the mensur, 
pleaded for a student court of honor, with power to 
brand acts as infamous and even to expel students, on 
the ground that honor had grown more inward, the 
traditions in favor of dueling w^ere too strong. The duel 
had a religious romantic origin as revealing God's judg- 
ment, and means that the victim of an insult is ready 
to stake body, or even life, and this is still its ideal side. 
Anachronism as it now is and degenerating readily to 
sport or spectacle, overpunishing what is often mere 
awkwardness or ignorance, it still impresses a certain 
sense of responsibility for conduct and gives some physi- 
cal training, slight and specialized though it be. The 
code is conventional, drawn directly from old French 
military life, and is not true to the line that separates 
real honor from dishonor, deliberate insult that wounds 
normal self-respect from injury fancied by oversensi- 
tiveness or feigned by arrogance; so that in its present 
form it is not the best safeguard of the sacred shrine 
of personality against invasion of its rights. If, as is 
claimed, it is some diversion from or fortification against 
corrosive sensuality, it has generally allied itself with 
excessive beer-drinking. Fencing, while an art suscep- 
tible of high development and valuable for both pose 
and poise and requiring great quickness of eye, arm, 

1 Der deutsche Student am Ende des 19 Jalirhunderts, 6th ed., 
Goschen, Leipzig, 1896. See also H. D. Sheldon: History and Pedagogy 
of American Student Societies, New York, 1901, p. 31 et seq. 

96 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

and wrist, is unilateral and robbed of the zest of inflict- 
ing real pain on an antagonist. 

Bushido,^ which means military-knightly ways, des- 
ignates the Japanese conception of honor in behavior 
and in fighting. The youth is inspired by the ideal of 
Tom Brown " to leave behind him the name of a fel- 
low w^ho never bullied a little boy or turned his back 
on a big one." It expresses the race ideal of justice, 
patriotism, and the duty of living aright and dying 
nobly. It means also sympathy, pity, and love, for only 
the bravest can be the tenderest, and those most in love 
are most daring, and it includes politeness and the art 
of poetry. Honor is a sense of personal dignity and 
worth, so the hiishi is truthful without an oath. At the 
tender age of five the samurai is given a real sword, and 
this gives self-respect and responsibility. At fifteen, 
two sharp and artistic ones, long and short, are given 
him, which must be his companions for life. They 
were made by a smith whose shop is a sanctuary and who 
begins his work with prayer. They have the finest 
hilts and scabbards, and are besung as invested with 
a charm or spell, and symbolic of loyalty and self- 
control, for they must never be drawn lightly. He is 
taught fencing, archery, horsemanship, tactics, the spear, 
ethics and literature, anatomy, for offense and defense; 
he must be indifferent to money, hold his life cheap 
beside honor, and die if it is gone. This chivalry is 
called the soul of Japan, and if it fades life is vulgar- 
ized. It is a code of ethics and physical training. 

Football is a magnificent game if played on honor. 
An English tennis champion was lately playing a rub- 
ber game with the American champion. They were even 

1 Bushido: The Soul of Japan. An exposition of Japanese thought, 
by Inazo Nitob6. New York, 1905, pp. 203 et seq. 

97 



YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

and near the end when the American made a bad fluke 
which would have lost this country its championship. 
The English player, scorning to win on an accident, 
intentionally made a similar mistake that the best man 
might win. The chief evil of modern American foot- 
ball which now threatens its suppression in some col- 
leges is the lust to win at any price, and results in 
tricks and secret practise. These sneaky methods impair 
the sentiment of honor which is the best and most po- 
tent of all the moral safeguards of youth, so that a 
young man can not be a true gentleman on the gridiron. 
This ethical degeneration is far worse than all the 
bruises, sprains, broken bones and even deaths it causes. 
Wrestling is a form of personal encounter which in 
antiquity reached a high development, and which, al- 
though now more known and practised as athletics of 
the body than of the soul, has certain special disciplinary 
capacities in its various forms. It represents the most 
primitive type of the struggle of unarmed and unpro- 
tected man with man. Purged of its barbarities, and in 
its Greco-Roman form and properly subject to rules, 
it cultivates more kinds of movements than any other 
form — for limbs, trunk, neck, hand, foot, and all in the 
upright and in every prone position. It, too, has its 
manual of feints, holds, tricks, and specialties, and calls 
out wariness, quickness, strength, and shiftiness. Vic- 
tory need involve no cruelty or even pain to the van- 
quished. The very closeness of body to body, em- 
phasizing flexor rather than extensor arm muscles, im- 
parts to it a peculiar tone, gives it a vast variety of 
possible activities, developing many alternatives at every 
stage, and tempts to many undiscovered forms of per- 
mament mayhem. Its struggle is usually longer and less 
interrupted by pauses than pugilism, and its situations 

98 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

and conclusions often develop slowly, so that all in all, 
its character among contests is unique. As a school 
of posture for art, its varieties are extremely manifold 
and by no means developed, for it contains every kind 
of emphasis of every part and calls out every muscle 
group and attitude of the human body; hence its train- 
ing is most generic and least specialized, and victories 
have been won by very many kinds of excellence. 

Perhaps nothing is more opposed to the idea of a 
gentleman than the sceva animi tempestas ^ of anger. 
A testy, quarrelsome, mucky humor is antisocial, and 
an outburst of rage is repulsive. Even non-resistance, 
turning the other cheek, has its victories and may be a 
method of moral combat. A strong temper well con- 
trolled and kept in leash makes a kinetic character ; but 
in view of bullying, unfair play, cruel injustice to the 
weak and defenseless, of outrageous wrong that the law 
can not reach, patience and forbearance may cease to 
be virtues, and summary redress may have a distinct ad- 
vantage to the ethical nature of man and to social order, 
and the strenuous soul must fight or grow stagnant or 
flabby. If too repressed, righteous indignation may 
turn to sourness and sulks, and the disposition be 
spoiled. Hence the relief and exhilaration of an out- 
break that often clears the psychic atmosphere like a 
thunderstorm, and gives the ' ' peace that passeth under- 
standing " so often dilated on by our correspondents. 
Rather than the abject fear of making enemies what- 
ever the provocation, I would praise those whose best 
title of honor is the kind of enemies they make. Better 
even an occasional nose dented by a fist, a broken bone, 
a rapier-scarred face, or even sometimes the sacrifice of 

1 Fierce tempest of the soul. 

99 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

the life of one of our best academic youth than stagna- 
tion, general cynicism and censoriousness, bodily and 
psychic cowardice, and moral corruption, if this indeed 
be, as it sometimes is, its real alternative. 

So closely are love and war connected that not only 
is individual pugnacity greatly increased at the period 
of sexual maturity, when animals acquire or develop 
horns, fangs, claws, spurs, and weapons of offense and 
defense, but a new spirit of organization arises which 
makes teams possible or more permanent. Football, 
baseball, cricket, etc., and even boating can become 
schools of mental and moral training. First, the rules 
of the game are often intricate, and to master and ob- 
serve them effectively is no mean training for the mind 
in controlling the body. These are steadily being re- 
vised and improved, and the reasons for each detail of 
inner construction and conduct of the game require 
experience and insight into human nature. Then the 
subordination of each member to the whole and to a 
leader cultivates the social and cooperative instincts, 
while the honor of the school, college, or city, which each 
team represents, is confided to each and all. Group 
loyalty in Anglo-Saxon games, which shows such a 
marked increment in coordination and self-subordina- 
tion at the dawn of puberty as to constitute a distinct 
change in the character of sports at this age, can be so 
utilized as to develop a spirit of service and devotion 
not only to town, country, and race, but to God and the 
church. Self must be merged and a sportsmanlike 
spirit cultivated that prefers defeat to tricks and secret 
practise, and a clean game to the applause of rooters 
and fans, intent only on victory, however won. The 
long, hard fight against professionalism that brings in 
husky muckers, who by every rule of true courtesy and 

100 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

chivalry belong outside academic circles, scrapping and 
underhand advantages, is a sad comment on the char- 
acter and spirit of these games, and eliminates the best 
of their educational advantages. The necessity of inter- 
vention, which has imposed such great burdens on facul- 
ties and brought so much friction with the frenzy of 
scholastic sentiment in the hot stage of seasonal enthu- 
siasms, when fanned to a white heat by the excessive 
interest of friends and patrons and the injurious ex- 
ploitation of the press, bears sad testimony to the 
strength and persistence of warlike instincts from our 
heredity. But even thus the good far predominates. 
The elective sj^stem has destroyed the class games, and 
our institutions have no units like the English colleges to 
be pitted against each other, and so, as colleges grow, 
an ever smaller percentage of students obtain the benefit 
of practise on the teams, while electioneering methods 
often place second-best men in place of the best. But 
both students and teachers are slowly learning wisdom 
in the dear school of experience. On the whole, there is 
less license in " breaking training " and in celebrating 
victories, and even at their worst, good probably pre- 
dominates, while the progress of recent years bids us 
hope. 

Finally, military ideals and methods of psycho- 
physical education are helpful regulations of the ap- 
petite for combat, and on the whole more wholesome 
and robust than those which are merely esthetic. March- 
ing in step gives proper and uniform movement of legs, 
arms, and carriage of body; the manual of arms, with 
evolution and involution of figures in the ranks, gives 
each a corporate feeling of membership, and involves 
care of personal appearance and accouterments, while 
the uniform levels social distinction in dress. For the 

101 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

French and Italian and especially the German and 
Russian adolescent of the lower classes, the two or three 
years of compulsory military service is often compared 
to an academic course, and the army is called, not with- 
out some justification, the poor man's university. It 
gives severe drill, strict discipline, good and regular 
hours, plain but wholesome fare and out-of-door exer- 
cise, exposure, travel, habits of neatness, many useful 
knacks and devices, tournaments and mimic or play 
battles; these, apart from its other functions, make this 
system a great promoter of national health and intelli- 
gence. Naval schools for midshipmen, who serve before 
the mast, schools on board ship that visit a wide curricu- 
lum of ports each year, cavalry schools, where each boy 
is given a horse to care for, study and train, artillery 
courses and even an army drill-master in an academy, 
or uniform, and a few exterior features of soldierly life, 
all give a distinct character to the spirit of any in- 
stitution. The very fancy of being in any sense a 
soldier opens up a new range of interests too seldom 
utilized ; and tactics, army life and service, military his- 
tory, battles, patriotism, the flag, and duties to country, 
should always erect a new standard of honor. Youth 
should embrace every opportunity that offers in this line, 
and instruction should greatly increase the intellectual 
opportunities created by every interest in warfare. It 
would be easy to create pregnant courses on how sol- 
diers down the course of history have lived, thought, 
felt, fought, and died, how great battles were won and 
what causes triumphed in them, and to generalize many 
of the best things taught in detail in the best schools 
of war in different grades and lands. 

A subtle but potent intersexual influence is among 
the strongest factors of all adolescent sport. Male birds 

102 

I/' 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

and beasts show off their charms of beauty and accom- 
plishment in many a liturgy of love antics in the 
presence of the female. This instinct seems somehow 
continuous with the growth of ornaments in the mating 
season. Song, tumbling, balking, mock fights, etc., are 
forms of animal courtship. The boy who turns cart- 
wheels past the home of the girl of his fancy, is brilliant, 
brave, Avitty, erect, strong in her presence, and elsewhere 
dull and commonplace enough, illustrates the same prin- 
ciple. The true cake-walk as seen in the South is pre- 
haps the purest expression of this impulse to courtship 
antics seen in man, but its irradiations are many and 
pervasive. The presence of the fair sex gives tonicity 
to youth's muscles and tension to his arteries to a 
degree of which he is rarely conscious. Defeat in all 
contests is more humiliating and victory more glorious 
thereby. Each sex is constantly passing the examination 
of the other, and each judges the other by standards dif- 
ferent from its own. Alas for the young people who are 
not different with the other sex from what they are with 
their own ! — and some are transformed into different be- 
ings. Achievement proclaims ability to support, defend, 
bring credit and even fame to the object of future choice, 
and no good point is lost. Physical force and skill, and 
above all, victory and glory, make a hero and invest him 
with a romantic glamour, which, even though concealed 
by conventionality or etiquette, is profoundly felt and 
makes the winner more or less irresistible. The applause 
of men and of mates is sweet and even intoxicating, but 
that of ladies is ravishing. By universal acclaim the fair 
belong to the brave, strong, and victorious. This stimu- 
lus is wholesome and refining. As is shown later, a 
bashful youth often selects a maiden onlooker and is 
sometimes quite unconsciously dominated in his every 
8 103 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

movement by a sense of her presence, stranger and ap- 
parently imnotieed though she be, although in the intel- 
lectual work of coeducation girls are most influenced 
thus. In athletics this motive makes for refinement and 
good form. The ideal knight, however fierce and terri- 
ble, must not be brutal, but show capacity for fine feeling, 
tenderness, magnanimity, and forbearance. Evolution- 
ists tell us that woman has domesticated and educated 
savage man and taught him all his virtues by exercising 
her royal prerogative of selecting in her mate just those 
qualities that pleased her for transmission to future 
generations and eliminating others distasteful to her. 
If so, she is still engaged in this work as much as ever, 
and in his dull, slow way man feels that her presence 
enforces her standards, abhorrent though it would be to 
him to compromise in one iota his masculinity. Most 
plays and games in which both sexes participate have 
some of the advantages with some of the disadvantages 
of coeducation. Where both are partners rather than 
antagonists, there is less eviration. A gallant man 
would do his best to help, but his worst not to beat a 
lady. Thus, in general, the latter performs her best 
service in her true role of sympathetic spectator rather 
than as fellow player, and is now an important factor 
in the physical education of adolescents. 

How pervasive this femininity is, which is slowly 
transforming our schools, is strikingly seen in the church. 
Gulick holds that the reason why only some seven per 
cent of the young men of the country are in the churches, 
while most members and workers are women, is that the 
qualities demanded are the feminine ones of love, rest, 
prayer, trust, desire for fortitude to endure, a sense of 
atonement — traits not involving ideals that most stir 
young men. The church has not yet learned to appeal to 

104 






PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

the more virile qualities. Fielding Hall ^ asks why Christ 
and Buddha alone of great religious teachers were re- 
jected by their own race and accepted elsewhere. He 
answers that these mild beliefs of peace, nonresistance, 
and submission, rejected by virile warrior races, Jews 
and ancient Hindus, were adopted where women were 
free and led in these matters. Confucianism, Moham- 
medanism, etc., are virile, and so indigenous, and in such 
forms of faith and worship women have small place. 
This again suggests how the sex that rules the heart con- 
trols men. 

Too much can hardly be said in favor of cold baths 
and swimming at this age. Marro - quotes Father 
Kneipp, and almost rivals his hydrotherapeutic enthusi- 
asm. Cold bathing sends the blood inward partly by the 
cold which contracts the capillaries of the skin and 
tissue immediately underlying it, and partly by the pres- 
sure of the water over all the dermal surface, quickens 
the activity of kidneys, lungs, and digestive apparatus, 
and the reactive glow is the best possible tonic for der- 
mal circulation. It is the best of all gymnastics for the 
nonstriated or involuntary muscles and for the heart 
and blood vessels. This and the removal of the products 
of excretion preserve all the important dermal func- 
tions which are so easily and so often impaired in modern 
life, lessen the liability to skin diseases, promote freshness 
of complexion; and the moral effects of plunging into 
cold and supporting the body in deep water is not in- 
considerable in strengthening a spirit of hardihood and 
reducing overtenderness to sensory discomforts. The 
exercise of swimming is unique in that nearly all the 
movements and combinations are such as are rarely used 

1 The Hearts of Men. Macmillan, 1901, chap. xxii. 

2 La Puberty. Schleicher Freres, editeurs, Paris, 1902. 

105 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

otherwise, and are perhaps in a sense ancestral and lib- 
eral rather than directly preparatory for future avoca- 
tions. Its stimulus for heart and lungs is, by general 
consent of all writers upon the subject, most wholesome 
and beneficial. Nothing so directly or quickly reduces to 
the lowest point the plethora of the sex organs. The 
very absence of clothes and running on the beach is ex- 
hilarating and gives a sense of freedom. Where prac- 
ticable it is well to dispense with bathing suits, even the 
scantiest. The warm bath tub is enfeebling and degen- 
erative, despite the cold spray later, while the free swim 
in cold water is most invigorating. 

Happily, city officials, teachers, and sanitarians are 
now slowly realizing the great improvement in health 
and temper that comes from bathing and are establish- 
ing beach and surf, spray, floating and plunge summer 
baths and swimming pools; often providing instruction 
even in swimming in clothes, undressing in the water, 
treading water, and rescue work, free as well as fee days, 
bathing suits, and, in London, places for nude bathing 
after dark ; establishing time and distance standards with 
certificates and even prizes; annexing toboggan slides, 
swings, etc., realizing that in both the preference of 
youth and in healthful and moral effects, probably noth- 
ing outranks this form of exercise. Such is its strange 
fascination that, according to one comprehensive census, 
the passion to get to the water outranks all other causes 
of truancy, and plays an important part in the motiva- 
tion of runaways. In the immense public establishment 
near San Francisco, provided by private munificence, 
there are accommodations for all kinds of bathing in hot 
and cold and in various degrees of fresh and salt water, 
in closed spaces and in the open sea, for small children 
and adults, with many appliances and instructors, all in 

106 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

one great covered arena with seats in an amphitheater 
for two thousand spectators, and many adjuncts and 
accessories. So elsewhere the presence of visitors is now 
often invited and provided for. Sometimes wash-houses 
and public laundries are annexed. Open hours and 
longer evenings and seasons are being prolonged. 

Prominent among the favorite games of early pu- 
berty and the years just before are those that involve 
passive motion and falling, like swinging in its many 
forms, including the May-pole and single rope varieties. 
Mr. Lee reports that children wait late in the evening 
and in cold weather for a turn at a park swing. Psy- 
chologically allied to these are wheeling and skating. 
Places for the latter are now often provided by the fire 
department, which in many cities floods hundreds of 
empty lots. Ponds are cleared of snow and horse- 
plowed, perhaps by the park commission, which often 
provides lights and perhaps ices the walks and streets for 
coasting, erects shelters, and devises space economy for 
as many diamonds, bleachers, etc., as possible. Games of 
hitting, striking, and throwing balls and other objects, 
hockey, tennis, all the courts of which are usually 
crowded, golf and croquet, and sometimes fives, cricket, 
bowling, quoits, curling, etc., have great " thum- 
ogenic " or emotional power. 

Leg exercise has perhaps a higher value than that of 
any other part. Man is by definition an upright being, 
but only after a long apprenticeship.^ Thus the hand 
was freed from the necessity of locomotion and made 
the servant of the mind. Locomotion overcomes the 
tendency to sedentary habits in modern schools and life, 
and helps the mind to helpful action, so that a peri- 

» See A. W. Trettien. Creeping and Walking. American Journal of 
Psychology, October, 1900, vol. 12, pp. 1-57. 

107 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

patetic philosophy is more normal than that of the easy 
chair and the study lamp. Hill-climbing is unexcelled as 
a stimulus at once of heart, lungs, and blood. If Hip- 
pocrates is right, inspiration is possible only on a moun- 
tain-top. Walking, running, dancing, skating, coasting 
are also alterative and regulative of sex, and there is a 
deep and close though not yet fully explained reci- 
procity between the two. Arm work is relatively too 
prominent a feature in gymnasia. Those who lead ex- 
cessively sedentary lives are prone to be turbulent and 
extreme in both passion and opinion, as witness the oft- 
adduced revolutionary disposition of cobblers. 

The play problem is now fairly open and is vast in 
its relation to many other things. Roof playgrounds, 
recreation piers, schoolyards and even school-buildings, 
open before and after school hours; excursions and out- 
ings of many kinds and with many purposes, which seem 
to distinctly augment growth; occupation during the 
long vacation when, beginning with spring, most juve- 
nile crime is committed; theatricals, which according to 
some police testimony lessen the number of juvenile de- 
linquents ; boys ' clubs with more or less self-government 
of the George Junior Republic and other types, treated 
in another chapter ; nature-study ; the distinctly different 
needs and propensities of both good and evil in different 
nationalities; the advantages of playground fences and 
exclusion, their disciplinary worth, and their value 
as resting places; the liability that *' the boy without 
a playground will become the father without a job "; 
the relation of play and its slow transition to manual 
and industrial education at the savage age when a boy 
abhors all regular occupation; the necessity of exciting 
interest, not by what is done for boys, but by what they 
do ; the adjustment of play to sex ; the determination of 

108 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

the proper average age of maximal zest in and good from 
sand-box, ring-toss, bean-bag, shuffle-board, peg-top, 
charity, funeral play, prisoner's base, hill-dill; the 
value and right use of apparatus, and of rabbits, pig- 
eons, bees, and a small menagerie in the playground; 
tan-bark, clay, the proper alternation of excessive free- 
dom, that often turns boys stale through the summer, 
with regulated activities; the disciplined " work of 
play ' ' and sedentary games ; the value of the washboard 
in rubbing and of the hand and knee exercise of scrub- 
bing, which a late writer would restore for all girls with 
clever and Greek-named play apparatus; as well as dig- 
ging, shoveling, tamping, pick-chopping, and hod-carry- 
ing exercises in the form of games for boys ; the relations 
of women's clubs, parents' clubs, citizens' leagues and 
unions, etc., to all this work — such are the practical 
problems. 

The playground movement encounters its chief ob- 
stacles in the most crowded and slum districts, where its 
greatest value and success was expected for boys in the 
early teens, who without supervision are prone to commit 
abuses upon property and upon younger children,^ and 
are so disorderly as to make the place a nuisance, and who 
resent the " fathering " of the police, without, at least, 
the minimum control of a system of permits and ex- 
clusions. If hoodlums play at all, they become infat- 
uated with baseball and football, especially punting; 
they do not take kindly to the soft large ball of the Hull 
House or the Civic League, and prefer at first scrub 
games with individual self-exhibition to organized teams. 
Lee sees the * ' arboreal instincts of our progenitors ' ' in 
the very strong propensity of boys from ten to fourteen 

' Constructive and Preventive Philantliropy, by Joseph Lee. Mac- 
millan, New York, 1902, chaps, x and xi. 

109 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

to climb in any form; to use traveling rings, generally 
occupied constantly to their fullest extent; to jump 
from steps and catch a swinging trapeze ; to go up a lad- 
der and slide down poles ; to use horizontal and parallel 
bars. The city boy has plenty of daring at this age, but 
does not know what he can do and needs more super- 
vision than the country youth. The young tough is com- 
monly present, and though admired and copied by 
younger boys, it is, perhaps, as often for his heroic as for 
his bad traits. 

Dr. Sargent and others have well pointed out that 
athletics afford a wealth of new and profitable topics for 
discussion and enthusiasm which helps against the tri- 
viality and mental vacuity into which the intercourse of 
students is prone to lapse. It prompts to discussion of 
diet and regimen. It gives a new standard of honor. For 
a member of a team to break training would bring repro- 
bation and ostracism, for he is set apart to win fame 
for his class or college. It supplies a splendid motive 
against all errors and vices that Aveaken or corrupt the 
body. It is a wholesome vent for the reckless courage 
that would otherwise go to disorder or riotous excess. 
It supplies new and advantageous topics for composi- 
tions and for terse, vigorous, and idiomatic theme-writ- 
ing, is a great aid to discipline, teaches respect for deeds 
rather than words or promises, lays instructors under the 
necessity of being more interesting, that their work be 
not jejune or dull by contrast; again the business side 
of managing great contests has been an admirable school 
for training young men to conduct great and difficult 
financial operations, sometimes involving $100,000 or 
more, and has thus prepared some for successful careers. 
It furnishes now the closest of all links between high 
school and college, reduces the number of those phys- 

110 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

ically unfit for college, and should give education gen- 
erally a more real and vigorous ideal. Its obvious dan- 
gers are distraction from study and overestimation of the 
value of victory, especially in the artificial glamours 
which the press and the popular furor give to great 
games ; unsportsmanlike secret tricks and methods, over- 
emphasis of combative and too stalwart impulses, and a 
disposition to carry things by storm, by rush-line tactics ; 
friction with faculties, and censure or neglect of in- 
structors who take unpopular sides on hot questions; 
reaction toward license after games, spasmodic excite- 
ment culminating in excessive strain for body and mind, 
with alternations of reaction; *' beefiness "; overdevel- 
opment of the physical side of life, and, in some cases, 
premature features of senility in later life, undergrowth 
of the accessory motor parts and powers, and erethic 
diathesis that makes steady and continued mental toil 
seem monotonous, dull, and boresome. 

The propensity to codify sports, to standardize the 
weight and size of their implements, and to reduce them 
to what Spencer calls regimentation, is an outcrop of 
uniformitarianism that works against that individuation 
which is one of the chief advantages of free play. This, 
to be sure, has developed old-fashioned rounders to 
modern baseball, and this is well, but it is seen in the 
elaborate Draconian laws, diplomacy, judicial and leg- 
islative procedures, concerning " eligibility, transfer, 
and even sale of players. ' ' In some games international 
conformity is gravely discussed. Even where there is 
no tyranny and oppression, good form is steadily ham- 
pering nature and the free play of personality. Togs 
and targets, balls and bats, rackets and oars are graded 
or numbered, weighed, and measured, and every emer- 
gency is legislated on and judged by an autocratic mar- 
Ill 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

tinet, jealous of every prerogative and conscious of his 
dignity. All this separates games from the majority 
and makes for specialism and professionalism. Not only 
this, but men are coming to be sized up for hereditary 
fitness in each point and for each sport. Runners, 
sprinters, and jumpers,^ we are told, on the basis of 
many careful measurements, must be tall, with slender 
bodies, narrow but deep chests, longer legs than the 
average for their height, the lower leg being especially 
long, with small calf, ankle, and feet, small arms, nar- 
row hips, with great power of thoracic inflation, and 
thighs of small girth. Every player must be studied by 
trainers for ever finer individual adjustments. His 
dosage of work must be kept well within the limits of 
his vitality, and be carefully adjusted to his recuperative 
power. His personal nascent periods must be noted, and 
initial embarrassment carefully weeded out. 

The field of play is as wide as life and its varieties 
far outnumber those of industries and occupations in the 
census. Plays and games differ in seasons, sex, and age. 
McGhee ^ has shown on the basis of some 8,000 children, 
that running plays are pretty constant for boys from 
six to seventeen, but that girls are always far behind 
boys and run steadily less from eight to eighteen. In 
games of choice, boys showed a slight rise at sixteen and 
seventeen, and girls a rapid increase at eleven and a 
still more rapid one after sixteen. In games of imita- 
tion girls excel and show a marked, as boys do a slight, 
pubescent fall. In those games involving rivalry boys 



' C. O. Bemies. Physical Characteristics of the Runner and Jumper. 
American Physical Education Review, September, 1900, vol. 5, pp. 
235-245. 

• A Study in the Play Life of some South Carolina Children. Peda- 
gogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 459-478. 

112 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

at first greatly excel girls, but are overtaken by the 
latter in the eighteenth year, both showing marked 
pubescent increment. Girls have the largest number of 
plays and specialize on a few less than boys, and most of 
these plays are of the unorganized kinds. Johnson ^ se- 
lected from a far larger number 440 plays and games 
and arranged the best of them in a course by school 
grades, from the first to the eighth, inclusive, and also 
according to their educational value as teaching ob- 
servation, reading and spelling, language, arithmetic, 
geography, history, and biography, physical training, 
and specifically as training legs, hand, arm, back, waist, 
abdominal muscles, chest, etc. ]\Iost of our best games 
are very old and, Johnson thinks, have deteriorated. But 
children are imitative and not inventive in their games, 
and easily learn new ones. Since the Berlin Play Con- 
gress in 1894 the sentiment has grown that these are of 
national importance and are preferable to gymnastics 
both for soul and body. Hence we have play-schools, 
teachers, yards, and courses, both for their own value 
and also to turn on the play impulse to aid in the 
drudgery of school work. Several have thought that a 
well-rounded, liberal education could be given by plays 
and games alone on the principle that there is no profit 
where there is no pleasure or true euphoria. 

Play is motor poetry. Too early distinction between 
play and work should not be taught. Education per- 
haps should really begin with directing childish sports 
aright. Froebel thought it the purest and most spir- 
itual activity of childhood, the germinal leaves of all 
later life. ' Schooling that lacks recreation favors dul- 
ness, for play makes the mind alert and its joy helps 

1 Education by Plays and Games. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 
1894, vol. 3, pp. 97-133. 

113 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

all anabolic activities. Says Brinton, " the measure of 
value of work is the amouiit of play there is in it, and 
the measure of value of play is the amount of work 
there is in it." Johnson adds that "it is doubtful if 
a great man ever accomplished his life work without 
having reached a play interest in it. ' ' Sully ^ deplores 
the increase of '' agolasts " or '' non-laughers " in our 
times in merry old England ^ every one played games ; 
and laughter, their natural accompaniment, abounded. 
Queen Elizabeth's maids of honor played tag with 
hilarity, but the spirit of play with full abandon seems 
taking its departure from our overworked, serious, and 
tense age. To requote Stevenson with variation, as 
lahorari,^ so liidere, et joculari orare sunt.* Laughter 
itself, as Kiihne long ago showed, is one of the most 
precious forms of exercise, relieving the arteries of their 
tension.^ 

The antithesis between play and work is generally 
wrongly conceived, for the difference is essentially in 
the degree of strength of the psycho-physic motivations. 
The young often do their hardest work in play. With 
interest, the most repellent tasks become pure sport, 
as in the case Johnson reports of a man who wanted a 
pile of stone thrown into a ditch and, by kindling a fire in 
the ditch and pretending the stones were buckets of water, 
the heavy and long-shirked job was done by tired boys 
with shouting and enthusiasm. Play, from one aspect 

1 An Essay on Laughter. Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1902, 
p. 427 et seq. 

2 See Brand's Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, 3 vols., Lon- 
don, 1883. 

3 To labor. 

* To play and to jest are to pray. 

* Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and the Comic, by G. Stanley 
Hall and Arthur Allin. American Journal of Psychology, October, 1897, 
vol. 9, pp. 1-41. 

114 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

of it, is superfluous energy over and above what is nec- 
essary to digest, breathe, keep the heart and organic 
processes going; and most children who can not play, 
if they have opportunity, can neither study nor 
work without overdrawing their resources of vitality. 
Bible psychology conceives the fall of man as the 
necessity of doing things without zest, and this is not 
only ever repeated but now greatly emphasized when 
youth leaves the sheltered paradise of play to grind in 
the mills of modern industrial civilization. The curse is 
overcome only by those who come to love their tasks 
and redeem their toil again to play. Play, hardly less 
than work, can be to utter exhaustion; and because it 
draws upon older stores and strata of psycho-physic 
impulsion its exhaustion may even more completely 
drain our kinetic resources, if it is too abandoned or 
prolonged. Play can do just as hard and painful tasks 
as work, for what we love is done with whole and un- 
divided personality. Work, as too often conceived, is 
all body and no soul, and makes for duality and not 
totality. Its constraint is external, mechanical, or it 
works by fear and not love. Not effort but zestless en- 
deavor is the tragedy of life. Interest and play are 
one and inseparable as body and soul. Duty itself is 
not adequately conceived and felt if it is not pleasure, 
and is generally too feeble and fitful in the young to 
awaken much energy or duration of action. Play is 
from within from congenital hereditary impulsion. It 
is the best of all methods of organizing instincts. Its 
cathartic or purgative function regulates irritability, 
which may otherwise be drained or vented in wrong 
directions, exactly as Breuer ^ shows psychic traumata 

1 1. Breuer and S. Freud. Studien uber Hysteria. F. Deuticke, 
Wien, 1895. See especially p. 177 et seq. 

115 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

may, if overtense, result in '' hysterical convulsions." 
It is also the best form of self-expression; and its ad- 
vantage is variability, following the impulsion of the 
idle, perhaps hyperemic, and overnourished centers most 
ready to act. It involves play illusion and is the great 
agent of unity and totalization of body and soul, while 
its social function develops solidarity and unison of ac- 
tion between individuals. The dances, feasts, and games 
of primitive people, wherein they rehearse hunting and 
war and act and dance out their legends, bring in- 
dividuals and tribes together.^ Work is menial, cheer- 
less, grinding, regular, and requires more precision and 
accuracy and, because attended with less ease and pleas- 
ure and economy of movement, is more liable to produce 
erratic habits. Antagonistic as the forms often are, 
it may be that, as Carr says, we may sometimes so 
suffuse work with the play spirit, and vice versa, that 
the present distinction between work and play will 
vanish, the transition will be less tragic and the activi- 
ties of youth will be slowly systematized into a whole 
that better fits his nature and needs; or, if not this, 
we may at least find the true proportion and system 
between drudgery and recreation. 

The worst product of striving to do things with 
defective psychic impulsion is fatigue in its common 
forms, which slows down the pace, multiplies errors and 
inaccuracies, and develops slovenly habits, ennui, flit- 
ting will specters, velleities and caprices, and neuras- 
thenic symptoms generally. It brings restlessness, and 
a tendency to many little heterogeneous, smattering 



1 See a valuable discussion by H. A. Carr. The Survival Values of 
Play, Investigations of the Department of Psychology and Education 
of the University of Colorado, Arthur AUin, Ph.D., Editor, November, 
1902, vol. 1, pp. 3-47 

116 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

efforts that weaken the will and leave the mind like 
a piece of well-used blotting paper, covered with traces 
and nothing legible. All beginnings are easy, and only 
as we leave the early stages of proficiency behind and 
press on in either physical or mental culture and en- 
counter difficulties, do individual differences and the 
tendency of weak wills to change and turn to some- 
thing else increase. Perhaps the greatest disparity be- 
tween men is the power to make a long concentrative, 
persevering e:^ort, for In der Beschrdnkung zeigt sick 
der Meister} Now no kind or line of culture is com- 
plete till it issues in motor habits, and makes a well-knit 
soul texture that admits concentration series in many 
directions and that can bring all its resources to bear 
at any point. The brain unorganized by training has, 
to recur to Richter's well-worn aphorism, saltpeter, sul- 
fur, and charcoal, or all the ingredients of gunpowder, 
but never makes a grain of it because they never get 
together. Thus willed action is the language of com- 
plete men and the goal of education. When things are 
mechanized by right habituation, there is still further 
gain ; for not only is the mind freed for further and 
higher work, but this deepest stratum of motor associ- 
ation is a plexus that determines not only conduct and 
character, but even beliefs. The person who deliber- 
ates is lost, if the intellect that doubts and weighs 
alternatives is less completely organized than habits. All 
will culture is intensive and should safeguard us against 
the chance influence of life and the insidious danger of 
great ideas in small and feeble minds. Now fatigue, 
personal and perhaps racial, is just what arrests in the 
incomplete and mere memory or noetic stage. It makes 

1 The master shows himself in Hmitation. 

117 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

weak bodies that command, and not strong ones that 
obey. It divorces knowing and doing, Kennen and 
Konnen, a separation which the Greeks could not con- 
ceive because for them knowledge ended in skill or was 
exemplified in precepts and proverbs that were so clear 
cut that the pain of violating them was poignant. Ideas 
must be long worked over till life speaks as with the 
rifle and not with the shotgun, and still less with the 
water hose. The purest thought, if true, is only action 
repressed to be ripened to more practical form. Not 
only do muscles come before mind, will before intel- 
ligence, and sound ideas rest on a motor basis, but all 
really useless knowledge tends to be eliminated as error 
or superstition. The roots of play lie close to those 
of creative imagination and idealism. 

The opposite extreme is the factitious and superficial 
motivation of fear, prizes, examinations, artificial and 
immediate rewards and penalties, which can only tattoo 
the mind and body with conventional patterns pricked 
in, but which lead an unreal life in the soul because they 
have no depth of soil in nature or heredity. However 
precious and coherent in themselves, all subject-matters 
thus organized are mere lugs, crimps, and frills. All such 
culture is spurious, unreal, and parasitic. It may make 
a scholastic or sophistic mind, but a worm is at the root 
and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge 
that does not become a rule of life, some form of 
pessimism is sure to supervene in every serious soul. 
With age a civilization accumulates such impedimenta, 
traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race fatigue proceeds 
with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate 
utilities are better, but yet not so much better than 
acquisitions that have no other than a school or exam- 
ination value. If, as Ruskin says, all true work is 

118 



PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES 

praise, all true play is love and prayer. Instil into a 
boy's soul learning which he sees and feels not to have 
the highest worth and which can not become a part 
of his active life and increase it, and his freshness, 
spontaneity, and the fountains of plaj^ slowly run dry 
in him, and his youth fades to early desiccation. The 
instincts, feelings, intuitions, the work of which is 
always play, are superseded by method, grind, and 
education by instruction which is only an effort 
to repair the defects of heredity, for which, at its 
best, it is a vulgar, pinchbeck substitute. The best 
play is true genius, which always comes thus into 
the world, and has this way of doing its work, and 
all the contents of the memory pouches is luggage to 
be carried rather than the vital strength that carries 
burdens. Gross well says that children are young be- 
cause they play, and not vice versa ; and he might have 
added, men grow old because they stop playing, and 
not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at 
the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type 
of research from sheer love of truth. Home, school, 
church, state, civilization, are measured in one supreme 
scale of values, viz., whether and how, for they aid in 
bringing youth to its fullest maturity. Even vice, crime, 
and decline are often only arrest or backsliding or 
reversion. National and racial decline beginning in 
eliminating one by one the last and highest styles 
of development of body and mind, mental stimulus of 
excessive dosage lowers general nutrition. A psj^cholo- 
gist that turns his back on mere subtleties and goes to 
work in a life of service has here a great opportunity, 
and should not forget, as Horace Mann said, " that for 
all that grows, one former is worth one hundred re- 
formers. ' ' 

9 119 



CHAPTER VII 

FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES 

Classifications of children's faults — Peculiar children — Real faults as dis- 
tinguished from interference with the teacher's ease — Truancy, its 
nature and effects — The genesis of crime — The lie, its classes and re- 
lations to imagination — Predatory activities — Gangs — Causes of 
crime — The effects of stories of crime — Temibility — Juvenile crime 
and its treatment. 

SiEGERT ^ groups children of problematical nature 
into the following sixteen classes : the sad, the extremely 
good or bad, star-gazers, scatter-brains, apathetic, mis- 
anthropic, doubters and investigators, reverent, critical, 
executive, stupid and clownish, naive, funny, anamnesic, 
disposed to learn, and blase; patience, foresight, and 
self-control, he thinks, are chiefly needed. 

A unique and interesting study was undertaken by 
Kozle ^ by collecting and studying thirty German writers 
on pedagogical subjects since Pestalozzi, and cataloguing 
all the words they use describing the faults of children. 
In all, this gave 914 faults, far more in number than 
their virtues. These were classified as native and of ex- 
ternal origin, acute and chronic, egoistic and altruistic, 
greed, perverted honor, self-will, falsity, laziness, frivol- 
ity, distraction, precocity, timidity, envy and malevo- 
lence, ingratitude, quarrelsomeness, cruelty, superstition ; 

1 Problematische Kindesnaturen. Eine Studie fiir Schule und Haus. 
Voigtlander, Leipzig, 1889. 

2 Die padagogische Pathologie in der Erziehungskunde des 19 
Jahrhunderts. Bertelsman, Giitersloh, 1893, p. 494. 

120 



FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES 

and the latter fifteen were settled on as resultant groups, 
and the authors who describe them best are quoted. 

Bohannon ^ on the basis of questionnaire returns 
classified peculiar children as heavy, tall, short, small, 
strong, weak, deft, agile, clumsy, beautiful, ugly, de- 
formed, birthmarked, keen and precocious, defective in 
sense, mind, and speechj^ nervous, clean, dainty, dirty, 



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orderly, obedient, disobedient, disorderly, teasing, buoy- 
ant, buffoon, cruel, selfish, generous, sympathetic, in- 
quisitive, lying, ill-tempered, silent, dignified, frank, 
loquacious, courageous, timid, whining, spoiled, glutton- 
ous, and only child. 

Marro ^ tabulated the conduct of 3,012 boys in gym- 
nasial and lyceal classes in Italy from eleven to eighteen 
years of age (see table given above). Conduct was 
marked as good, bad, and indifferent, according to the 

1 Peculiar and Exceptional Cliildren. Pedagogical Seminary, Octo- 
ber, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 3-60. 

2 La Pubertd. Schleicher Freres, Paris, 1902, p. 72. 

121 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

teacher's estimate, and was good at eighteen in 74 per 
cent of the cases; at eleven in 70 per cent; at seventeen 
in 69 per cent; and at fourteen in only 58 per cent. In 
positively bad conduct, the age of fifteen led, thirteen 
and fourteen were but little better, while it improved at 
sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. In general, conduct 
was good at eleven; declined at twelve and thirteen; 
sank to its worst at fourteen; and then improved in 
yearly increments that did not differ much, and at seven- 
teen was nearly as good as at eleven, and at eighteen 
four points better. 

He computed also the following percentage table of 
the causes of punishments in certain Italian schools for 
girls and boys near pubescent ages: 

Boys Girls 

Quarrels and blows 53 .90 17 .4 

Laziness, negligence 1 . 80 21.3 

Untidiness 10.70 24.7 

Improper language 41 14.6 

Indecent acts and words 1 .00 .24 

Refusal to work 82 1.26 

Various offenses against discipline 19 . 00 19 . 9 

Truancy 9.60 .0 

Plots to run away 1 . 70 .0 

Running away 72 .0 

Mr. Sears ^ reports in percentages statistics of the 
punishments received by a thousand children for the 
following offenses: Disorder, 17^; disobedience, 16; 
carelessness, 13 J; running away, 12|; quarreling, 10; 
tardiness, 6|; rudeness, 6; fighting, 5J; lying, 4; steal- 
ing, 1 ; miscellaneous, 7^. He names a long list of pun- 
ishable offenses, such as malice, swearing, obscenity, 
bullying, lying, cheating, untidiness, insolence, insult, 

1 Home and School Punishments. Pedagogical Seminary, March, 
1899, vol. 6, pp. 159-187. 

122 



I 



FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES 

conspiracy, disobedience, obstinacy, rudeness, noisiness, 
ridicule; injury to books, building, or other property; 
and analyzes at length the kinds of punishment, modes 
of making it fit the offense and the nature of the child, 
the discipline of consequences, lapse of time between the 
offense and its punishment, the principle of slight but 
sure tasks as penalties, etc. 

Triplett ^ attempted a census of faults and defects 
named by the teacher. Here inattention by far led all 
others. Defects of sense and speech, carelessness, in- 
difference, lack of honor and of self-restraint, laziness, 
dreamy listlessness, nervousness, mental incapacity, lack 
of consideration for others, vanity, affectation, dis- 
obedience, untruthfulness, grumbling, etc., follow. In- 
attention to a degree that makes some children at the 
mercy of their environment and all its changes, and their 
mental life one perpetual distraction, is a fault which 
teachers, of course, naturally observe. Children's views 
of their own faults and those of other children lay a very 
different emphasis. Here fighting, bullying, and teasing 
lead all others; then come stealing, bad manners, lying, 
disobedience, truancy, cruelty to animals, untidiness, 
selfishness, etc. Parents' view of this subject Triplett 
found still different. Here wilfulness and obstinacy 
led all others with teasing, quarreling, dislike of applica- 
tion and effort, and many others following. The vast 
number of faults mentioned contrasts very strikingly 
with the seven deadly sins. 

In a suggestive statistical study on the relations of 
the conduct of children to the weather. Dexter ^ found 



1 A Study of the Faults of Children. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 
1903, vol. 10, p. 200 et seq. 

2 The Child and the Weather, by Edwin G. Dexter. Pedagogical 
Seminary, April, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 512-522. 

123 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

that excessive humidity was most productive of misde- 
meanors; that when the temperature was between 90 
and 100 the probability of bad conduct was increased 
300 per cent, when betw^een 80 and 90 it was increased 
104 per cent. Abnormal barometric pressure, whether 
great or small, was found to increase misconduct 50 per 
cent ; abnormal movements of the wind increased it from 
20 to 66 per cent ; while the time of year and precipita- 
tion seemed to have almost no effect. While the effect 
of weather has been generally recognized by superintend- 
ents and teachers and directors of prisons and asylums, 
and even by banks, which in London do not permit clerks 
to do the more important bookkeeping during very foggy 
days, the statistical estimates of its effect in general 
need larger numbers for more valuable determina- 
tions. Temperature is known to have a very distinct 
effect upon crime, especially suicide and truancy. Work- 
men do less in bad weather, blood pressure is modi- 
fied, etc.^ 

In his study of truancy, Kline ^ starts with the as- 
sumption that the maximum metabolism is always con- 
sciously or unconsciously sought, and that migrations 
are generally away from the extremes of hot and cold 
toward an optimum temperature. The curve of truan- 
cies and runaways increases in a marked ratio at pu- 
berty, which probably represents the age of natural 
majority among primitive people. Dislike of school, the 
passion for out-of-door life, and more universal interests 
in man and nature now arise, so that runaways may 
be interpreted as an instinctive rebellion against limita- 

1 Psychic Effects of the Weather, by J. S. Lemon. American 
Journal of Psychology, January, 1894, vol. 6, pp. 277-279. 

2 Truancy as Related to the Migrating Instinct, by L. W. Kline. 
Pedagogical Seminary, January, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 381-420. 

124 



FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES 

tions of freedom and unnatural methods of education as 
well as against poor homes. Hunger is one of its most 
potent, although often unconscious causes. The habit- 
ual environment now begins to seem dull and there is a 
great increase in impatience at restraint. Sometimes 
there is a mania for simply going away and enjoying the 
liberty of nomadic life. Just as good people in foreign 
parts sometimes allow themselves unwonted liberties, so 
vagrancy increases crime. The passion to get to and play 
at or in the water is often strangely dominant. It seems 
so fine out of doors, especially in the spring, and the 
woods and fields make it so hard to voluntarily incarcer- 
ate oneself in the schoolroom, that pubescent boys and 
even girls often feel like animals in captivity. They 
long intensely for the utter abandon of a wilder life, and 
very characteristic is the frequent discarding of foot and 
head dress and even garments in the blind instinct to 
realize again the conditions of primitive man. The man- 
ifestations of this impulse, if read aright, are grave ar- 
raignments of the lack of adaptability of the child's 
environment to his disposition and nature, and with 
home restraints once broken, the liabilities to every crime, 
especially theft, are enormously increased. The truant, 
although according to Kline's measurements slightly 
smaller than the average child, is more energetic and is 
generally capable of the greatest activity and useful- 
ness in more out-of-door vocations. Truancy is aug- 
mented, too, just in proportion as legitimate and interest- 
ing physical exercise is denied. 

The vagrant, itinerant, vagabond, gadabout, hobo, 
and tramp, that Riis has made so interesting, is an 
arrested, degenerate, or perverted being who abhors 
work; feels that the world owes him a living; and gen- 
erally has his first real nomad experience in the teens, 

125 



YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

or earlier. It is a chronic illusion of youth that gives 
'' elsewhere " a special charm. In the immediate 
present things are mean, dulled by wont, and perhaps 
even nauseating because of familiarity. There must be 
a change of scene to see the world; man is not sessile 
but locomotor; and the moment his life becomes mi- 
gratory all the restraints and responsibilities of settled 
life vanish. It is possible to steal and pass on undis- 
covered and unsuspected, and to steal again. The 
vagabond escapes the control of public sentiment, which 
normally is an external conscience, and having none of 
his own within him thus lapses to a feral state. The 
constraint of city, home, and school is especially irk- 
some, and if to this repulsion is added the attraction 
of a love of nature and of perpetual change, we have 
the diathesis of the roadsman already developed. Ado- 
lescence is the normal time of emancipation from the 
parental roof, when youth seeks to set up a home of 
its own, but the apprentice to life must wander far and 
long enough to find the best habitat in which to set up 
for himself. This is the spring season of emigration; 
and it should be an indispensable part of every life 
curriculum, just before settlement, to travel far and 
wide, if resources and inclination permit. But this 
stage should end in w^isely chosen settlement where the 
young life can be independently developed, and that 
with more complacency and satisfaction because the 
place has been wisely chosen on the basis of a wide 
comparison. The chronic vagrant has simply failed to 
develop the reductives of this normal stage. 

Crime is cryptogamous and flourishes in concealment, 
so that not only does falsehood facilitate it, but certain 
types of lies often cause and are caused by it. The begin- 
ning of wisdom in treatment is to discriminate between 

126 



FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES 

good and bad lies. My own study ^ of the lies of 300 
normal children, by a method carefully devised in order 
to avoid all indelicacy to the childish consciousness, 
suggested the following distinct species of lies. It is 
often a well-marked epoch when the young child first 
learns that it can imagine and state things that have no 
objective counterpart in its life, and there is often a 
weird intoxication when some absurd and monstrous 
statement is made, while the first sensation of a delib- 
erate break with truth causes a real excitement Avhich 
is often the birth pang of the imagination. IMore com- 
monly this is seen in childish play, which owes a part 
of its charm to self-deception. Children make believe 
they are animals, doctors, ogres, play school, that they 
are dead, mimic all they see and hear. Idealizing tem- 
peraments sometimes prompt children of three or four 
suddenly to assert that they saw a pig with five ears, 
apples on a cherry-tree, and other Llunchausen won- 
ders, which really means merely that they have had a 
new mental combination independently of experience. 
Sometimes their fancy is almost visualization and de- 
velops into a kind of mythopeic faculty which spins 
clever yarns and suggests in a sense, quite as pregnant 
as Froschmer asserts of all mental activity and of the 
universe itself, that all their life is imagination. Its 
control and not its elimination in a Gradgrind age of 
crass facts is what should be sought in the interests of 
the highest truthfulness and of the evolution of thought 
as something above reality, which prepares the way for 
imaginative literature. The life of Hartley Coleridge,^ 
by his brother, is one of many illustrations. He fancied 

1 Children's Lies. American Journal of Psychology, January, 1890, 
vol. 3, pp. 59-70. 

2 Poems, With memoir by his brother, 2 vols., London, 1851. 

127 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

a cataract of what he named " jug-force " would burst 
out in a certain field and flow between populous banks, 
where an ideal government, long wars, and even a re- 
form in spelling, would prevail, illustrated in a journal 
devoted to the affairs of this realm — all these developed 
in his imagination, where they existed with great reality 
for years. The vividness of this fancy resembles the 
pseudo-hallucinations of Kandinsky. Two sisters used 
to say, ' ' Let us play we are sisters, " as if this made the 
relation more real. Cagliostro found adolescent boys 
particularly apt for training for his exhibition of 
phrenological impostures, illustrating his thirty-five 
faculties. " He lied when he confessed he had lied," said 
a young Sancho Panza, who had believed the wild tales 
of another boy who later admitted their falsity. Sir 
James Mackintosh, near puberty, after reading Roman 
history, used to fancy himself the Emperor of Con- 
stantinople, and carried on the administration of the 
realm for hours at a time. His fancies never quite be- 
came convictions, but adolescence is the golden age of 
this kind of dreamery and reverie which supplements 
reality and totalizes our faculties, and often gives a 
special charm to dramatic activities and in morbid cases 
to simulation and dissimulation. It is a state from 
which some of the bad, but far more of the good quali- 
ties of life and mind arise. These are the noble lies 
of poetry, art, and idealism, but their pedagogic regi- 
men must be wise. 

Again with children as with savages, truth depends 
largely upon personal likes and dislikes. Truth is for 
friends, and lies are felt to be quite right for enemies. 
The young often see no wrong in lies their friends wish 
told, but may collapse and confess when asked if they 
would have told their mother thus. Boys best keep up 

128 



FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES 

complotted lies and are surer to own up if caught than 
girls. It is harder to cheat in school with a teacher 
who is liked. Friendships are cemented by confidences 
and secrets, and when they wane, promises not to tell 
weaken in their validity. Lies to the priest, and above 
all to God, are the worst. All this makes special at- 
tention to friendships, leaders, and favorites important, 
and suggests the high value of science for general 
veracity. 

The worst lies, perhaps, are those of selfishness. 
They ease children over many hard places in life, and 
are convenient covers for weakness and vice. These 
lies are, on the whole, judging from our census, most 
prevalent. They are also most corrupting and hard to 
correct. All bad habits particularly predispose to the 
lie of concealment; for those who do wrong are almost 
certain to have recourse to falsehood, and the sense of 
meanness thus slowly bred, which may be met by ap- 
peals to honor, for so much of which school life is 
responsible, is often mitigated by the fact that false- 
hoods are frequently resorted to in moments of danger 
and excitement, are easily forgotten when it is over, and 
rarely rankle. These, even more than the pseudomaniac 
cases mentioned later, grow rankly in those with crim- 
inal predispositions. 

The lie heroic is often justified as a means of noble 
ends. Youth has an instinct which is wholesome for 
viewing moral situations as wholes. Callow casualists 
are fond of declaring that it would be a duty to state 
that their mother was out when she was in, if it would 
save her life, although they perhaps would not lie to 
save their own. A doctor, many suggested, might tell 
an overanxious patient or friend that there was hope, 
saving his conscience perhaps by reflecting that there 

129 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

was hope, although they had it while he had none. The 
end at first in such cases may be very noble and the 
fib or quibble very petty, but worse lies for meaner 
objects may follow. Youth often describes such situa- 
tions with exhilaration as if there were a feeling of 
easement from the monotonous and tedious obligation of 
rigorous literal veracity, and here mentors are liable 
to become nervous and err. The youth who really gets 
interested in the conflict of duties may reverently be 
referred to the inner lie of his own conscience, the need 
of keeping which as a private tribunal is now apparent. 

Many adolescents become craven literalists and dis- 
tinctly morbid and pseudophobiac, regarding every de- 
viation from scrupulously literal truth as alike heinous ; 
and many systematized palliatives and casuistic word- 
splittings, methods of whispering or silently interpola- 
ting the words '' not," " perhaps," or "I think," 
sometimes said over hundreds of times to neutralize the 
guilt of intended or unintended falsehoods, appear in 
our records as a sad product of bad methods. 

Next to the selfish lie for protection — of special 
psychological interest for adolescent crime — is what we 
may call pseudomania, seen especially in pathological 
girls in their teens, who are honeycombed with selfish- 
ness and affectation and have a passion for always act- 
ing a part, attracting attention, etc. The recent lit- 
erature of telepathy and hypnotism furnishes many 
striking examples of this diathesis of impostors of both 
sexes. It is a strange psychological paradox that some 
can so deliberately prefer to call black white and find 
distinct inebriation in flying diametrically in the face 
of truth and fact. The great impostors, whose entire 
lives have been a fabric of lies, are cases in point. They 
find a distinct pleasure not only in the sense of power 

130 



FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES 

which their ability to make trouble gives, but in the 
sense of making truth a lie and of decreeing things into 
and out of existence. 

Sheldon's interesting statistics show that among the 
institutional activities of American children/ predatory 
organizations culminate from eleven to fifteen, and are 
chiefly among hoys. These include bands of robbers, 
clubs for hunting and fishing, play armies, organized 
fighting bands between separate districts, associations for 
building forts, etc. This form of association is the 
typical one for boys of twelve. After this age their 
interests are gradually transferred to less loosely or- 
ganized athletic clubs. Sheldon's statistics are as fol- 
lows: 

Age 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Total 

No ofpred-|4 5 3 7 113 10 25 = Girls 
Ss!°' J 4 2 17 31 18 22 (11) 7 1 lll=Boys 

Innocent though these predatory habits may be in 
small boys, if they are not naturally and normally re- 
duced at the beginning of the teens and their energy 
worked off into athletic societies, they become danger- 
ous. " The robber knight, the pirate chief, and the 
savage marauder become the real models." The steal- 
ing clubs gather edibles and even useless things, the loss 
of which causes mischief, into some den, cellar, or camp 
in the woods, where the plunder of their raids is col- 
lected. An organized gang of boy pilferers for the 
purpose of entering stores had a cache, where the stolen 
goods were brought together. Some of these bands have 
specialized on electric bells and connections, or golf 
sticks and balls. Jacob Riis says that on the East Side 

1 American Journal of Psychology, July, 1898, vol. 9, pp. 425-448. 

131 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

of New l^ork, every corner has its gang with a pro- 
gram of defiance of law and order, where the young 
tough who is a coward alone becomes dangerous when 
he hunts with the pack. He is ambitious to get 
" pinched " or arrested and to pose as a hero. His 
vanity may obliterate common fear and custom as his 
mind becomes inflamed with flash literature and ' ' penny 
dreadfuls." Sometimes whole neighborhoods are ter- 
rorized so that no one dares to testify against the atroci- 
ties they commit. Riis even goes so far as to say that 
" a bare enumeration of the names of the best-known 
gangs would occupy the pages of this book."^ The 
names are sufficiently suggestive — hell's kitchen gang, 
stable gang, dead men, floaters, rock, pay, hock gang, 
the soup-house gang, plug uglies, back-alley men, dead 
beats, cop beaters and roasters, hell benders, chain gang, 
sheeny skinners, street cleaners, tough kids, sluggers, 
wild Indians, cave and cellar men, moonlight howlers, 
junk club, crook gang, being some I have heard of. Some 
of the members of these gangs never knew a home, were 
found perhaps as babies wrapped in newspapers, sur- 
vivors of the seventy-two dead infants Riis says were 
picked up on the streets in New Y^ork in 1889, or of 
baby farming. They grow up street arabs, slum waifs, 
the driftwood of society, its flotsam and jetsam, or 
plankton, fighting for a warm corner in their resorts or 
living in crowded tenement-houses that rent for more 
than a house on Fifth Avenue. Arrant cowards singly, 
they dare and do anything together. A gang stole a 
team in East New York and drove down the avenue, 
stopping to throw in supplies, one member sitting in 
the back of the wagon and shooting at all who inter- 

1 How the Other Half Lives. Scribner's Sons, New York, 1890, 
p. 229. 

132 



FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES 

fered. One gang specialized on stealing baby carriages, 
depositing their inmates on the sidewalk. Another blew 
up a grocery store because its owner refused a gift they 
demanded. Another tried to saw off the head of a Jewish 
pedler. One member killed another for calling him ' ' no 
gent." Six murderous assaults were made at one time 
by these gangs within a single week. One who is caught 
and does his " bit " or " stretch " is a hero, and when 
a leader is hanged, as has sometimes happened, he is 
almost envied for his notoriety. A frequent ideal is to 
pound a policeman with his own club. The gang fed- 
erates all nationalities. Property is depreciated and 
may be ruined if it is frequented by these gangs or 
becomes their lair or " hang-out." A citizen residing 
on the Hudson procured a howitzer and pointed it at 
a boat gang, forbidding them to land on his river front- 
age. They have their calls, whistles, signs, rally sud- 
denly from no one knows where, and vanish in the 
alleys, basements, roofs, and corridors they know so 
well. Their inordinate vanity is well called the slum 
counterpart of self-esteem, and Riis calls the gang a 
club run wild. They have their own ideality and a 
gaudy pinchbeck honor. A young tough, when ar- 
rested, wrenched aAvay the policeman's club, dashed into 
the street, rescued a baby from a runaway, and came 
back and gave himself up. They batten on the yellowest 
literature. Those of foreign descent, who come to speak 
our language better than their parents, early learn to 
despise them. Gangs emulate each other in hardihood, 
and this is one cause of epidemics in crime. They pas- 
sionately love boundless independence, are sometimes 
very susceptible to good influence if applied wdth great 
wisdom and discretion, but easily fall away. What is 
the true moral antitoxin for this class, or at least what 

133 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

is the safety-valve and how and when to pull it, we 
are now just beginning to learn, but it is a new spe- 
cialty in the great work of salvage from the wreckage 
of city life. In London, where these groups are better 
organized and yet more numerous, war is often waged 
between them, weapons are used and murder is not so 
very infrequent. Normally this instinct passes harm- 
lessly over into associations for physical training, which 
furnishes a safe outlet for these instincts, until the 
reductives of maturer years have perfected their work. 
The causation of crime, which the cure seeks to re- 
move, is a problem comparable with the origin of sin 
and evil. First, of course, comes heredity, bad ante- 
natal conditions, bad homes, unhealthful infancy and 
childhood, overcrowded slums with their promiscuity 
and squalor, which are always near the border of law- 
lessness, and perhaps are the chief cause of crime. A 
large per cent of juvenile offenders, variously estimated, 
but probably one-tenth of all, are vagrants or without 
homes, and divorce of parents and illegitimacy seem 
to be nearly equal as causative agencies. If whatever is 
physiologically wrong is morally wrong, and whatever is 
physiologically right is morally right, we have an im- 
portant ethical suggestion from somatic conditions. 
There is no doubt that conscious intelligence during a 
certain early stage of its development tends to de- 
teriorate the strength and infallibility of instinctive 
processes, so that education is always beset with the 
danger of interfering with ancestral and congenital 
tendencies. Its prime object ought to be moralization, 
but it can not be denied that in conquering ignorance we 
do not thereby conquer poverty or vice. After the free 
schools in London were opened there was an increase 
of juvenile offenders. New kinds of crime, such as 

134 



FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES 

forgery, grand larceny, intricate swindling schemes, 
were doubled, while sneak thieves, drunkards, and pick- 
pockets decreased, and the proportion of educated crim- 
inals was greatly augmented/ To collect masses of 
children and cram them with the same unassimilated 
facts is not education in this sense, and we ought to 
confess that youthful crime is an expression of educa- 
tional failure. Illiterate criminals are more likely to 
be detected, and also to be condemned, than are edu- 
cated criminals. Every anthropologist knows that the 
deepest poverty and ignorance among primitive people 
are in nowise incompatible with honesty, integrity, and 
virtue. Indeed there is much reason to suspect that 
the extremes of wealth and poverty are more produc- 
tive of crime than ignorance, or even intemperance. 
Educators have no doubt vastly overestimated the moral 
efficiency of the three R's and forgotten that character 
in infancy is all instinct; that in childhood it is slowly 
made over into habits ; while at adolescence more than at 
any other period of life, it can be cultivated through 
ideals. The dawn of puberty, although perhaps marked 
by a certain moral hebetude, is soon followed by a 
stormy period of great agitation, when the very worst 
and best impulses in the human soul struggle against 
each other for its possession, and when there is peculiar 
proneness to be either very good or very bad. As the 
agitation slowly subsides, it is found that there has been 
a renaissance of either the best or the worst elements 
of the soul, if not indeed of both. 

Although pedagogues make vast claims for the 
moralizing effect of schooling, I can not find a single 
criminologist who is satisfied with the modern school, 

» The Curse in Education, by Rebecca Harding Davis. North Amer- 
ican Review, May, 1899, vol. 168, pp. 609-614. 

10 135 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

while most bring the severest indictments against it for 
the blind and ignorant assumption that the three R's 
or any merely intellectual training can moralize. By 
nature, children are more or less morally blind, and 
statistics show that between thirteen and sixteen incor- 
rigibility is between two and three times as great as at 
any other age. It is almost impossible for adults to 
realize the irresponsibility and even moral neurasthenia 
incidental to this stage of development. If we reflect 
what a girl would be if dressed like a boy and leading 
his life and exposed to the same moral contagion, or 
what a boy would be if corseted and compelled to live 
like a girl, perhaps we can realize that whatever role 
heredity plays, the youth who go wrong are, in the vast 
majority of cases, victims of circumstances or of im- 
maturity, and deserving of both pity and hope. It was 
this sentiment that impelled Zarnadelli to reconstruct 
the criminal law of Italy, in this respect, and it was 
this sympathy that made Rollet a self-constituted ad- 
vocate, pleading each morning for the twenty or thirty 
boys and eight or ten girls arrested every day in Paris. 
Those smitten with the institution craze or with 
any extreme correctionalist views will never solve the 
problem of criminal youths. First of all, they must 
be carefully and objectively studied, lived with, and 
understood as in this country Gulick, Johnson, Forbush, 
and Yoder are doing in different ways, but each with 
success. Criminaloid youth is more sharply individ- 
ualized than the common good child, who is less differ- 
entiated. Virtue is more uniform and monotonous than 
sin. There is one right but there are many wrong ways, 
hence they need to be individually studied by every pai- 
dological method, physical and psychic. Keepers, attend- 
ants, and even sponsors who have to do with these chil- 

136 



FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES 

dren should be educators with souls full of fatherhood 
and motherhood, and they should understand that the 
darkest criminal propensities are frequently offset by 
the very best qualities ; that juvenile murderers are often 
very tender-hearted to parents, sisters, children, or 
pets ; ^ they should understand that in the criminal con- 
stitution there are precisely the same ingredients, al- 
though perhaps differently compounded, accentuated, 
mutually controlled, etc., by the environment, as in 
themselves, so that to know all would, in the great 
majority of cases, be to pardon all; that the home 
sentiments need emphasis; that a little less stress of 
misery to overcome the effects of economic malaise and, 
above all, a friend, mentor, adviser are needed. 

I incline to think that many children would be bet- 
ter and not worse for reading, provided it can be done 
in tender years, stories like those of Captain Kidd, Jack 
Sheppard, Dick Turpin, and other gory tales, and per- 
haps later tales like Eugene Aram, and the ophidian 
medicated novel, Elsie Venner, etc., on the principle of 
the Aristotelian catharsis to arouse betimes the higher 
faculties which develop later, and whose function it is 
to deplete the bad centers and suppress or inhibit their 
activity. Again, I believe that judicious and incisive 
scolding is a moral tonic, which is often greatly needed, 
and if rightly administered would be extremely effective, 
because it shows the instinctive reaction of the sane 
conscience against evil deeds and tendencies. Special 
pedagogic attention should be given to the sentiment of 
justice, which is almost the beginning of personal morals 
in boys ; and plays should be chosen and encouraged that 
hold the beam even, regardless of personal wish and 



1 Holtzendorff: Psychologie des Mordes. C. Pfeiffer, Berlin, 1875. 

137 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

interest. Further yet benevolence and its underlying 
impulse to do more than justice to our associates; to 
do good in the world; to give pleasure to those about, 
and not pain, can be directly cultivated. Truth-telling 
presents a far harder problem, as we have seen. It 
is no pedagogical triumph to clip the wings of fancy, 
but effort should be directed almost solely against the 
cowardly lies, which cover evil ; and the heroism of 
telling the truth and taking the consequences is another 
of the elements of the moral sense, so complex, so late in 
development, and so often permanently crippled. The 
money sense, by all the many means now used for its 
development in school, is the surest safeguard against the 
most common juvenile crime of theft, and much can be 
taught by precept, example, and moral regimen of the 
sacredness of property rights. The regularity of school 
work and its industry is a valuable moralizing agent, but 
entirely inadequate and insufficient by itself. Educators 
must face the fact that the ultimate verdict concerning 
the utility of the school will be determined, as Talleck 
well says, by its moral efficiency in saving children from 
personal vice and crime. 

Wherever any source of pollution of school com- 
munities occurs, it must be at once and effectively de- 
tected, and some artificial elements must be introduced 
into the environment. In other words, there must be 
a system of moral orthopedics. Garof alo 's ^ new term 
and principle of " temibility " is perhaps of great 
service. He would thus designate the quantum of evil 
feared that is sufficient to restrain criminal impulsion. 
We can not measure guilt or culpability, which may be 
of all degrees from nothing to infinity perhaps, but we 

1 La Criminologie. Paris, Alcan, 1890, p. 332. 
138 



FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES 

can to some extent scale the effectiveness of restraint, 
if criminal impulse is not absolutely irresistible. Pain 
then must be so organized as to follow and measure the 
offense by as nearly a natural method as possible, while 
on the other hand the rewards for good conduct must 
also be more or less accentuated. Thus the problem of 
criminology for youth can not be based on the principles 
now recognized for adults. They can not be protective 
of society only, but must have marked reformatory ele- 
ments. Solitude ^ which tends to make weak, agitated, 
and fearful, at this very gregarious age should be en- 
forced with very great discretion. There must be no 
personal and unmotivated clemency or pardon in such 
a scheme, for, according to the old saw, " IMercy but 
murders, pardoning those who kill "; nor on the other 
hand should there be the excessive disregard of per- 
sonal adjustments, and the uniformitarian, who per- 
haps celebrated his highest triumph in the old sentence, 
** Kill all offenders and suspects, for God will know his 
own," should have no part nor lot here. The philoso- 
pher Hartmann has a suggestive article advocating that 
penal colonies made up of transported criminals should 
be experimented upon by statesmen in order to put vari- 
ous theories of self-government to a practical test. How- 
ever this may be, the penologist of youth must face 
some such problem in the organization of the house of 
detention, boj^s' club, farm, reformatory, etc. We must 
pass beyond the clumsy apparatus of a term sentence, 
or the devices of a jury, clumsier yet, for this purpose; 
we must admit the principle of regret, fear, penance, 
material restoration of damage, and understand the 

1 See its psychology and dangers well pointed out by M. H. Small: 
Psychical Relations of Society and Solitude. Pedagogical Seminary, 
April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 13-69. 

139 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

sense in which, for both society and for the individual, 
it makes no practical difference whether experts think 
there is some taint of insanity, provided only that 
irresponsibility is not hopelessly complete. 

In few aspects of this theme do conceptions of and 
practises in regard to adolescence need more radical 
reconstruction. A mere accident of circumstance often 
condemns to criminal careers youths capable of the 
highest service to society, and for a mere brief season 
of temperamental outbreak or obstreperousness exposes 
them to all the infamy to which ignorant and cruel 
public opinion condemns all those who have once been 
detected on the wrong side of the invisible and ar- 
bitrary line of rectitude. The heart of criminal psy- 
chology is here; and not only that, but I would con- 
clude with a most earnest personal protest against the 
current methods of teaching and studying ethics in our 
academic institutions as a speculative, historical, and 
abstract thing. Here in the concrete and saliently 
objective facts of crime it should have its beginning, 
and have more blood and body in it by getting again 
close to the hot battle line between vice and virtue, 
and then only, when balanced and sanified by a rich 
ballast of facts, can it with advantage slowly work its 
way over to the larger and higher philosophy of con- 
duct, which, when developed from this basis, will be 
a radically different thing from the shadowy phantom, 
schematic speculations of many contemporary moralists, 
taught in our schools and colleges. 



140 






u. v; ^ -\ 



.xy: ^ 



CHAPTER VIII 

BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

Knightly ideals and honor — Thirty adolescents from Shakespeare-^ 
Goethe — C. D. Warner — Aldrich — The fugitive nature of adolescent 
experience — Extravagance of autobiographies — Stories that attach to 
great names — Some typical crazes — Illustrations from George Eliot, 
Edison, Chatterton, Hawthorne, Whittier, Spencer, Huxley, Lyell, 
Byron, Heine, Napoleon, Darwin, Martineau, Agassiz, Madame Ro- 
land. Louisa Alcott, F. H. Burnett, Helen Keller, Marie Bashkirtseff, 
Mary MacLane, Ada Negri, De Quincey, Stuart Mill, Jefferies, and 
scores of others. 

The knightly ideals and those of secular life gen- 
erally during the middle ages and later were in striking 
contrast to the ascetic ideals of the early Christian 
Church; in some respects they were like those of the 
Greeks. Honor was the leading ideal, and muscular de- 
velopment and that of the body were held in high 
respect; so that the spirit of the age fostered concep- 
tions not unlike those of the Japanese Bushido. Where 
elements of Christianity were combined with this we 
have the spirit of the pure chivalry of King Arthur and 
the Knights of the Round Table, which affords perhaps 
the very best ideals for youth to be found in history, 
as we shall see more fully later. 

In a very interesting paper, entitled " Shakespeare 
and Adolescence,'^ Dr. M. F. Libby ^ very roughly reck- 
ons *' seventy-four interesting adolescents among the 

1 Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1901, vol. 8, pp. 163-205. 
141 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

comedies, forty-six among the tragedies, and nineteen 
among the histories/' He selects ^' thirty characters 
who, either on account of direct references to their age, 
or because of their love-stories, or because they show the 
emotional and intellectual plasticity of youth, may be 
regarded as typical adolescents." His list is as fol- 
lows: Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, Ophelia, Imogen, Perdita, 
Arviragus, Guiderius, Palamon, Arcite, Emilia, Ferdi- 
nand, Miranda, Isabella, Mariana, Orlando, Rosalind, 
Biron, Portia, Jessica, Phebe, Katharine, Helena, Viola, 
Troilus, Cressida, Cassio, Marina, Prince Hal, and Rich- 
ard of Gloucester. The proof of the youth of these char- 
acters, as set forth, is of various kinds, and Libby holds 
that besides these, the sonnets and poems perhaps show a 
yet greater, more profound and concentrated knowledge 
of adolescence. He thinks *' Venus and Adonis " a 
successful attempt to treat sex in a candid, naive way, 
if it be read as it was meant, as a catharsis of passion, in 
which is latent a whole philosophy of art. To some ex- 
tent he also finds the story of the Passionate Pilgrim 
'' replete with the deepest knowledge of the passions of 
early adolescence. ' ' The series culminates in Sonnet 116, 
which makes love the sole beacon of humanity. It 
might be said that it is connected by a straight line with 
the best teachings of Plato, and that here humanity 
picked up the clue, lost, save with some Italian poets, 
in the great interval. 

In looking over current autobiographies of well-known 
modern men who deal with their boyhood, one finds 
curious extremes. On the one hand are those of which 
Goethe's is a type, where details are dwelt upon at great 
length with careful and suggestive philosophic reflec- 
tions. The development of his own tastes, capacities, 

142 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

and his entire adult consciousness was assumed to be due 
to the incidents of childhood and youth, and especially 
the latter stage was to him full of the most serious prob- 
lems essential to his self-knowledge ; and in the story of 
his life he has exploited all available resources of this 
genetic period of storm and stress more fully perhaps 
than any other writer. At the other extreme, we have 
writers like Charles Dudley Warner,^ a self-made man, 
whose early life was passed on the farm, and who holds 
his own boyhood there in greater contempt than perhaps 
any other reputable writer of such reminiscences. All 
the incidents are treated not only with seriousness, but 
with a forced drollery and catchy superficiality which 
reflect unfavorably at almost every point upon the mem- 
bers of his household, who are caricatured ; all the pre- 
cious associations of early life on a New England farm 
are not only made absurd, but from beginning to end his 
book has not a scintilla of instruction or suggestion for 
those that are interested in child life. Aldrich ^ is bet- 
ter, and we have interesting glimpses of the pet horse 
and monkeys, of his fighting the boy bully, running 
away, and falling in love with an older girl whose en- 
gagement later blighted his life. Howells,^ White,* 
Mitter,^ Grahame,® Heidi,^ and Mrs. Burnett,^ might 
perhaps represent increasing grades of merit in thi^ field 
in this respect. 

Yoder,^ in his interesting study of the boyhood of 
great men, has called attention to the deplorable careless- 

1 Being a Boy. 2 Story of a Bad Boy. 

3 A Boy's Town. * Court of Boyville. 

s The Spoilt Child, by Peary Chandmitter. Translated by G. D. Os- 
well. Thacker, Spink and Co., Calcutta, 1893. ^ The Golden Age. 

7 Frau Spyri. s The One I Knew the Best of All. 

9 The Study of the Boyhood of Great Men. Pedagogical Seminary, 
October, 1894, vol. 3, pp. 134-156. 

143 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

ness of their biographers concerning the facts and in- 
fluences of their youth. He advocates the great ped- 
agogic influence of biography, and would restore the 
high appreciation of it felt by the Bolandists, which 
Comte's positivist calendar, that renamed all the days 
of the year from three hundred and sixty-flve such 
accounts in 1849, also sought to revive. Yoder selected 
fifty great modern biographies, autobiographies pre- 
ferred, for his study. He found a number of lives whose 
equipment and momentum have been strikingly due to 
some devoted aunt, and that give many glimpses of the 
first polarization of genius in the direction in which fame 
is later achieved. He holds that, while the great men 
excelled in memory, imagination is perhaps still more 
a youthful condition of eminence; magnifies the stim- 
ulus of poverty, the fact that elder sons become prom- 
inent nearly twice as often as younger ones; and raises 
the question whether too exuberant physical develop- 
ment does not dull genius and talent. 

One striking and cardinal fact never to be forgotten 
in considering its each and every phenomenon and stage 
is that the experiences of adolescence are extremely trans- 
itory and very easily forgotten, so that they are often 
totally lost to the adult consciousness. Lancaster ^ ob- 
serves that we are constantly told by adults past thirty 
that they never had this and that experience, and that 
those who have had them are abnormal ; that they are far 
more rare than students of childhood assert, etc. He 
says, ' ' Not a single young person with whom I have had 
free and open conversation has been free from serious 
thoughts of suicide," but these are forgotten later. A 
typical case of many I could gather is that of a lady, not 

1 The Vanishing Character of Adolescent Experiences. North- 
Western Monthly, June, 1898, vol. 8, p. 644. 

144 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

yet in middle life, precise and carefully trained, who, 
on hearing a lecture on the typical phases of adolescence, 
declared that she must have been abnormal, for she 
knew nothing of any of these experiences. Her mother, 
however, produced her diary, and there she read for the 
first time since it was written, beginning in the January 
of her thirteenth year, a long series of resolutions which 
revealed a course of conduct that brought the color to 
her face, that she should have found it necessary to 
pledge not to swear, lie, etc., and which showed conclu- 
sively that she had passed through about all the phases 
described. These phenomena are sometimes very in- 
tense and may come late in life, but it is impossible to 
remember feelings and emotions wdth definiteness, and 
these now make up a large part of life. Hence we are 
prone to look with some incredulity upon the immediate 
records of the tragic emotions and experiences typical 
and normal at this time, because development has scored 
away their traces from the conscious soul. 

There is a wall around the town of Boyville, says 
AVhite,^ in substance, which is impenetrable when its 
gates have once shut upon youth. An adult may peer 
over the wall and try to ape the games inside, but finds 
it all a mockery and himself banished among the pur- 
blind grown-ups. The town of Boyville was old when 
Nineveh was a hamlet; it is ruled by ancient laws; has 
its own rulers and idols ; and only the dim, unreal noises 
of the adult world about it have changed. 

In exploring such sources we soon see how few writ- 
ers have given true pictures of the chief traits of this 
developmental period, which can rarely be ascertained 
with accuracy. The adult finds it hard to recall the 

1 The Court of BojryiUe, by William Allen White. New York, 1899, 
p. 358. 

145 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

emotional and instinctive life of the teens which is ban- 
ished without a trace, save as scattered hints may be 
gathered from diaries, chance experiences, or the recol- 
lections of others. But the best observers see but very 
little of what goes on in the youthful soul, the develop- 
ment of which is very largely subterranean. Only when 
the feelings erupt in some surprising way is the process 
manifest. The best of these sources are autobiographies, 
and* of these only few are full of the details of this stage. 
Just as in the mythic prehistoric stage of many nations 
there is a body of legendary matter, which often reap- 
pears in somewhat different form, so there is a floating 
plankton-like mass of tradition and storiology that 
seems to attach to eminence wherever it emerges and is 
repeated over and over again, concerning the youth of 
men who later achieve distinction, which biographers 
often incorporate and attach to the time, place, and 
person of their heroes. 

As Burnham ^ well intimates, many of the literary 
characterizations of adolescence are so marked by ex- 
travagance, and sometimes even by the struggle for lit- 
erary effects, that they are not always the best documents, 
although often based on personal experience. Con- 
fessionalism is generally overdrawn, distorted, and es- 
pecially the pains of this age are represented as too keen. 
Of George Eliot's types of adolescent character, this may 
best be seen in Maggie Tulliver, with her enthusiastic 
self-renunciation, with " her volcanic upheavings of im- 
prisoned passions," with her ''wide, hopeless yearning 
for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest 
and best on this earth," and in Gwendolen, who, from 
the moment she caught Deronda's eye, was " totally 

1 The Study of Adolescence. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1891, 
vol. 1, pp. 174-195. 

146 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

swayed in feeling and action by the presence of a person 
of the other sex whom she had never seen before." 
There was '' the resolute action from instinct and the 
setting at defiance of calculation and reason, the want 
of any definite desire to marry, while all her conduct 
tended to promote proposals." Exaggeration, although 
not the perversions of this age often found in adult 
characterizations, is a marked trait of the writings of 
adolescents, whose conduct meanwhile may appear 
rational, so that this suggests that consciousness may at 
this stage serve as a harmless vent for tendencies that 
would otherwise cause great trouble if turned to practi- 
cal affairs. If Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the ado- 
lescent tyrant slayers of Greece, had been theorists, they 
might have been harmless on the principle that its 

^ analysis tends to dissipate emotion. 

^ ^ Lancaster ^ gathered and glanced over a thousand 
biographies, from which he selected 200 for careful 
study, choosing them to show different typical directions 
of activity. Of these, 120 showed a distinct craze for 
reading in adolescence; 109 became great lovers of 
nature; 58 wrote poetry, 58 showed a great and sudden 
development of energy; 55 showed great eagerness for 
school; 53 devoted themselves for a season to art and 
music ; 53 became very religious ; *51 left home in the 
teens ; 51 showed dominant instincts of leadership ; 49 had 
great longings of many kinds; 46 developed scientific 
tastes; 41 grew very anxious about the future; 34 de- 
veloped increased keenness of sensation or at least power 
of observation; in 32 cases health was better; 31 were 
passionately altruistic; 23 became idealists; 23 showed 
powers of invention; 17 were devoted to older friends; 

1 Lancaster: The Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence. Peda- 
gogical Seminary, July, 1897, vol. 5, p. 106. 

147 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

15 would reform society; 7 hated school. These, like 
many other statistics, have only indicative value, as they 
are based on numbers that are not large enough and 
upon returns not always complete. 

A few typical instances from Lancaster must here 
suffice. Savonarola was solitary, pondering, meditating, 
felt profoundly the evils of the world and need of re- 
form, and at twenty-two spent a whole night planning 
his career. Shelley during these years was unsocial, 
much alone, fantastic, wandered much by moonlight 
communing with stars and moon, was attached to an 
older man. Beecher was intoxicated with nature, which 
he declared afterward to have been the inspiration of his 
life. George Eliot at thirteen had a passion for music and 
became a clever pianist. At sixteen she was religious, 
founded societies for the poor and for animals, and 
had flitting spells of misanthropy. Edison undertook 
to read the Detroit Free Library through, read fifteen 
solid feet as the books stand on the shelves, was stopped, 
and says he has read comparatively little since. Tolstoi 
found the aspect of things suddenly changed. Nature 
put on a new appearance. He felt he might commit 
the most dreadful crimes with no purpose save curiosity 
and the need of action. The future looked gloomy. He 
became furiously angry without cause; thought he was 
lost, hated by everybody, was perhaps not the son of his 
father, etc. At seventeen he was solitary, musing about 
immortality, human destiny, feeling death at hand, giv- 
ing up his studies, fancying himself a great man with 
new truths for humanity. By and by he took up the old 
virtuous course of life with fresh power, new resolutions, 
with the feeling that he had lost much time. He had a 
deep religious experience at seventeen and wept for joy 
over his new life. He had a period before twenty when 

148 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

he told desperate lies, for which he could not account, 
then a passion for music, and later for French novels. 
Rousseau at this age was discontented, immensely in love, 
wept often without cause, etc. Keats had a great change 
at fourteen, wrestling with frequent obscure and pro- 
found stirrings of soul, with a sudden hunger for knowl- 
edge which consumed his days with fire, and " with 
passionate longing to drain the cup of experience at a 
draft." He was " at the morning hour when the whole 
world turns to gold." " The boy had suddenly become 
a poet. ' ' Chatterton was too proud to eat a gift dinner, 
though nearly starved, and committed suicide at seven- 
teen for lack of appreciation. John Hunter was dull 
and hated study, but at twenty his mind awoke as did 
that of Patrick Henry, who before was a lonely wan- 
derer, sitting idly for hours under the trees. Alexander 
Murray awoke to life at fifteen and acquired several 
languages in less than two years. Gifford was dis- 
traught for lack of reading, went to sea at thirteen, be- 
came a shoemaker, studying algebra late at night, was 
savagely unsociable, sunk into torpor from which he was 
roused to do splenetic and vexatious tricks, which alien- 
ated his friends. Rittenhouse at fourteen was a plow- 
boy, covering the fences with figures, musing on infinite 
time and space. Benjamin Thompson was roused to a 
frenzy for sciences at fifteen ; at seventeen walked nine 
miles daily to attend lectures at Cambridge; and at 
nineteen married a widow of thirty-three. Franklin had 
a passion for the sea ; at thirteen read poetry all night ; 
wrote verses and sold them on the streets of Boston; 
doubted everything at fifteen ; left home for good at sev- 
enteen; started the first public library in Philadelphia 
before he was twenty-one. Robert Fulton was poor, 
dreamy, mercurial, devoted to nature, art, and literature. 

149 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

He became a painter of talent, then a poet, and left home 
at seventeen. Bryant was sickly till fourteen- and be- 
came permanently well thereafter; was precociously de- 
voted to nature, religion, prayed for poetic genius and 
wrote Thanatopsis before he was eighteen. Jefferson 
doted on animals and nature at fourteen, and at seven- 
teen studied fifteen hours a day. Garfield, though liv- 
ing in Ohio, longed for the sea, and ever after this 
period the sight of a ship gave him a strange thrill. 
Hawthorne was devoted to the sea and wanted to sail on 
and on forever and never touch shore again. He would 
roam through the Maine woods alone ; was haunted by the 
fear that he would die before twenty-five. Peter Cooper 
left home at seventeen ; was passionately altruistic ; and 
at eighteen vowed he would build a place like his New 
York Institute. AVhittier at fourteen found a copy of 
Burns, which excited him and changed the current of his 
life. Holmes had a passion for flowers, broke into 
poetry at fifteen, and had very romantic attachments 
to certain trees. J. T. Trowbridge learned German, 
French, and Latin alone before twenty-one; composed 
poetry at the plow and wrote it out in the even- 
ing. Joseph Henry followed a rabbit under the Pub- 
lic Library at Albany, found a hole in the floor that 
admitted him to the shelves, and, unknown to any one, 
read all the fiction the library contained, then turned 
to physics, astronomy, and chemistry, and developed a 
passion for the sciences. He was stage-struck, and be- 
came a good amateur actor. H. H. Boyesen was thrilled 
by nature and by the thought that he was a Norseman. 
He had several hundred pigeons, rabbits, and other pets ; 
loved to be in the woods at night; on leaving home for 
school was found with his arms around the neck of a 
calf to which he was saying good-by. Maxwell, at six- 

150 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

teen, had almost a horror of destroying a leaf, flower, 
or fly. Jahn found growing in his heart, at this age, an 
inextinguishable feeling for right and wrong — which 
later he thought the cause of all his inner weal and outer 
woe. When Nansen was in his teens he spent weeks at 
a time alone in the forest, full of longings, courage, 
altruism, wanted to get away from every one and live 
like Crusoe. T. B. Reed, at twelve and thirteen, had a 
passion for reading; ran away at seventeen; painted, 
acted, and wrote poetry. Cartwright, at sixteen, heard 
voices from the sky saying, " Look above, thy sins 
are forgiven thee." Herbert Spencer became an engi- 
neer at seventeen, after one idle year. He never went to 
school, but was a private pupil of his uncle. Sir James 
Mackintosh grew fond of history at eleven; fancied he 
was the Emperor of Constantinople; loved solitude at 
thirteen; wrote poetry at fourteen; and fell in love at 
seventeen. Thomas Buxton loved dogs, horses, and lit- 
erature, and combined these while riding on an old horse. 
At sixteen he fell in love with an older literary woman, 
which aroused every latent power to do or die, and there- 
after he took all the school prizes. Scott began to like 
poetry at thirteen. Pascal wrote treatises on conic sec- 
tions at sixteen and invented his arithmetical machine 
at nineteen. Nelson went to sea at twelve; commanded 
a boat in peril at fifteen, which at the same age he left to 
fight a polar bear. Banks, the botanist, was idle and 
listless till fourteen, could not travel the road marked 
out for him; when coming home from bathing, he was 
struck by the beauty of the flowers and at once began his 
career. Montcalm and Wolfe both distinguished them- 
selves as leaders in battle at sixteen. Lafayette came to 
America at nineteen, thrilled by our bold strike for 
liberty. Gustavus Adolphus declared his own majority 
11 151 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

at seventeen and was soon famous. Ida Lewis rescued 
four men in a boat at sixteen. Joan of Arc began at 
thirteen to have the visions which were the later guide 
of her life. 

Mr. Swift has collected interesting biographical ma- 
terial ^ to show that school work is analytic, while life 
is synthetic, and how the narrowness of the school en- 
closure prompts many youth in the wayward age to 
jump fences and seek new and more alluring pastures. 
According to school standards, many were dull and in- 
dolent, but their nature was too large or their ideals 
too high to be satisfied with it. Wagner at the Niko- 
laischule at Leipzig w^as relegated to the third form, 
having already attained to the second at Dresden, which 
so embittered him that he lost all taste for philology 
and, in his own words, " became lazy and slovenly." 
Priestley never improved by any systematic course of 
study. \Y. H. Gibson was very slow and was rebuked 
for wasting his time in sketching. James Russell Lowell 
was reprimanded, at first privately and then publicly, 
in his sophomore year '' for general negligence in 
themes, forensics, and recitations," and finally sus- 
pended in 1838 *' on account of continued neglect of 
his college duties." In early life Goldsmith's teacher 
thought him the dullest boy she had ever taught. His 
tutor called him ignorant and stupid. Irving says that 
a lad " whose passions are not strong enough in youth 
to mislead him from that path of science which his 
tutors, and not his inclinations, have chalked out, by 
four or five years' perseverance, will probably obtain 
every advantage and honor his college can bestow. I 



1 Standards of Efficiency in School and in Life. Pedagogical Semi- 
nary, March, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 3-22. 

152 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

would compare the man whose youth has been thus 
passed in the tranquility of dispassionate prudence, to 
liquors that never ferment, and, consequently, continue 
always muddy." Huxley detested writing till past 
twenty. His schooling was very brief, and he declared 
that those set over him '' cared about as much for his 
intellectual and moral welfare as if they were baby 
farmers." Humphry Davy was faithful but showed 
no talent in school, having ^' the reputation of being an 
idle boy, with a gift for making verses, but with no 
aptitude for studies of a graver sort." Later in life 
he considered it fortunate that he was left so much to 
himself. Byron was so poor a scholar that he only 
stood at the head of the class when, as was the custom, 
it was inverted, and the bantering master repeatedly 
said to him, " Now, George, man, let me see how soon 
you'll be at the foot." Schiller's negligence and lack 
of alertness called for repeated reproof, and his final 
school thesis was unsatisfactory. Hegel was a poor 
scholar, and at the university it was stated " that he 
was of middling industry and knowledge but especially 
deficient in philosophy." John Hunter nearly became 
a cabinetmaker. Lyell had excessive aversion to work. 
George Combe wondered why he was so inferior to 
other boys in arithmetic. Heine agreed with the monks 
that Greek was the invention of the devil. " God 
knows what misery I suffered with it." He hated 
French meters, and his teacher vowed he had no soul 
for poetry. He idled away his time at Bonn, and was 
" horribly bored " by the '* odious, stiff, cut-and-dried 
tone " of the leathery professors. Humboldt was 
feeble as a child and " had less facility in his studies 
than most children." " Until I reached the age of 
sixteen," he says, *' I showed little inclination for 

153 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

scientific pursuits. ' ' He was essentially self-taught, and 
acquired most of his knowledge rather late in life. At 
nineteen he had never heard of botany. Sheridan was 
called inferior to many of his schoolfellows. He was 
remarkable for nothing but idleness and winning man- 
ners, and was " not only slovenly in construing, but 
unusually defective in his Greek grammar." Swift 
was refused his degree because of '' dulness and insuffi- 
ciency," but given it later as a special favor. Words- 
worth was disappointing. General Grant was never 
above mediocrity, and was dropped as corporal in the 
junior class and served the last year as a private. W. 
H. Seward was called ' ' too stupid to learn. ' ' Napoleon 
graduated forty-second in his class. '' Who," asks 
Swift, '^ were the forty-one above him? " Darwin was 
^' singularly incapable of mastering any language." 
When he left school, he says, '' I was considered by all 
my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, 
rather below the common standard in intellect. To my 
deep mortification, my father once said to me, ' You 
care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, 
and you will be a disgrace to yourself and to all your 
family.' " Harriet Martineau was thought very dull. 
Though a born musician, she could do absolutely noth- 
ing in the presence of her irritable master. She wrote 
a cramped, untidy scrawl until past twenty. A visit 
to some very brilliant cousins at the age of sixteen had 
much to do in arousing her backward nature. At this 
age J. Pierpont Morgan wrote poetry and was devoted 
to mathematics. Booker T. Washington, at about thir- 
teen or fourteen (he does not know the date of his birth) , 
felt the new meaning of life and started off on foot to 
Hampton, five hundred miles away, not knowing even 
the direction, sleeping under a sidewalk his first night 

154 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

in Richmond. Vittorino da Feltre/ according to Dr. 
Burnham, had a slow, tardy development, lingering on 
a sluggish dead level from ten to fourteen, which to his 
later unfoldment was as the barren, improving years 
sometimes called the middle ages, compared with the 
remainder which followed when a new world-conscious- 
ness intensified his personality. 

Lancaster's summaries show that of 100 actors, the 
average age of their first great success was exactly 18 
years. Those he chose had taken to the stage of their 
own accord, for actors are more born than made. 
Nearly half of them were Irish, the unemotional Ameri- 
can stock having furnished far less. Few make their 
first success on the stage after 22, but from 16 to 20 
is the time to expect talent in this line, although there 
is a second rise in his curve before and still more after 
25, representing those whose success is more due to 
intellect. Taking the average age of 100 novelists when 
their first story met with public approval, the curve 
reaches its highest point between 30 and 35. Averag- 
ing 53 poets, the age at which most first poems were pub- 
lished falls between 15 and 20. The average age at 
which first publication showed talent he places at 18, 
which is in striking contrast with the average age of 
inventors at time of the first patent, which is 33 years. 

A still more striking contrast is that between 100 
musicians and 100 professional men. IMusic is by far 
the most precocious and instinctive of all talents. The 
average age when marked talent was first shown is a 
little less than 10 years, 95 per cent showed rare talent 
before 16, while the professional men graduated at an 
average age of 24 years and 11 months, and 10 years 

* See also Vittorino da Feltre and other Humanist Educators, by 
W. H. Woodward. Cambridge University Press, 1897. 

155 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

must be added to mark the point of recognized success. 
Of 53 artists, 90 per cent showed talent before 20, the 
average age being 17.2 years. Of 100 pioneers who 
made their mark in the Far West, leaving home to seek 
fortunes near the frontier, the greatest number de- 
parted before they were 18. Of 118 scientists, Lancas- 
ter estimates that their life interest first began to glow 
on the average a little before they were 19. In general, 
those whose success is based on emotional traits antedate 
by some years those whose renown is more purely in 
intellectual spheres, and taking all together, the curves 
of the first class culminate between 18 and 20. 

"While men devoted to physical science, and their bi- 
ographers, give us perhaps the least breezy accounts of 
this seething age, it may be, because they mature late, 
nearly all show its ferments and its circumnutations, as 
a few almost random illustrations clearly show : 

Tycho Brahe, born in 1546 of illustrious Danish stock, was adopted 
by an uncle, and entered the University of Copenhagen at thirteen, 
where multiplication, division, philosophy, and metaphysics were 
taught. When he was fourteen, an eclipse of the sun occurred, which 
aroused so much interest that he decided to devote himself to the 
study of the heavenly bodies. He was able to construct a series of 
interesting instruments on a progressive scale of size, and finally to 
erect the great Observatory of Uraniberg on the Island of Hven. 
Strange to say, his scientific conclusions had for him profound 
astrological significance. An important new star he declared was 
"at first like Venus and Jupiter, and its efTects will therefore first be 
pleasant; but as it then became like Mars, there will next come a 
period of wars, seditions, captivity, and death of princes, and de- 
struction of cities, together with dryness and fiery meteors in the 
air, pestilence, and venomous snakes. Lastly, the star became like 
Saturn, and thus will finally come a time of want, death, imprison- 
ment, and all kinds of sad things!" He says that "a special use of 
astronomy is that it enables us to draw conclusions from the move- 
ments in the celestial regions as to human fate." He labored on his 
island twenty years. He was always versifying, and inscribed a 

156 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

poem over the entrance of his underground observatory expressing 
the astonishment of Urania at finding in the interior of the earth a 
cavern devoted to the study of the heavens. 

GaUleo ^ was born in 1564 of a Florentine noble, who was poor. 
As a youth he became an excellent lutist, then thought of devoting 
himself to painting, but when he was seventeen studied medicine, 
and at the University of Pisa fell in love with mathematics. 

Isaac Newton,^ born in 1642, very frail and sickly, solitary, had a 
very low place in the class lists of his school; wrote poetry, and at 
sixteen tried farming. In one of his university examinations in 
Euclid he did so poorly as to incur special censure. His first in- 
centive to diligent study came from being severely kicked by a high 
class boy. He then resolved to pass him in studies, and soon rose 
to the head of the school. He made many ingenious toys and wind- 
mills; a carriage, the wheels of which were driven by the hands of 
the occupants, and a clock which moved by water; curtains, kites, 
lanterns, etc.; and before he was fourteen fell in love with Miss 
Storey, several years older than himself. He entered Trinity College 
at Cambridge at eighteen. 

William Herschel, born in 1738, at the outbreak of the Seven 
Years* War, when he was eighteen, was a performer in the regimental 
band, and after a battle passed a night in a ditch and escaped in 
disguise, to England, where he eked out a precarious livelihood 
by teaching music. He supported himself until middle age as an 
organist. In much of his later work he was greatly aided by his 
sister Caroline. When he discovered a sixth planet he became fa- 
mous, and devoted himself exclusively to astronomy, training his 
only son to follow in his footsteps, and dying in 1822. 

Agassiz 3 at twelve had developed a mania for collecting. He 
memorized Latin names, of which he accumulated "great volumes of 
MSS.," and "modestly expressed the hope that in time he might be 
able to give the name of every known animal." At fourteen he re- 
volted at mercantile life, for which he was designed, and issued a 
manifesto planning to spend four j^ears at a German university, then 
in Paris, when he could begin to write. Books were scarce, and a 
little later he copied, with the aid of his brother, several large vol- 
umes, and had fifty live birds in his room at one time. 

* See The Private Life of Galileo; from his Correspondence and that 
of his Eldest Daughter. Anon. Macmillan, London, 1870. 

2 See Sir David Brewster's Life of Newton. Harper, New York, 
1874. 

3 Louis Agassiz, His Life and Work, by C. F. Holder. G. P. Put- 
nam's Sons, New York, 1893. 

157 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

At twelve Huxley ^ became an omnivorous reader, and two or 
three years later devoured Hamilton's Logic and became deeply 
interested in metaphysics. At fourteen he saw and participated in 
his first post-mortem examination, was left in a strange state of 
apathy by it, and dates his life-long dyspepsia to this experience. 
His training was irregular ; he taught himself German with a book in 
one hand while he made hay with the other; speculated about the 
basis of matter, soul, and their relations, on radicalism and con- 
servatism; and reproached himself that he did not work and get on 
enough. At seventeen he attempted a comprehensive classification 
of human knowledge, and having finished his survey, resolved to 
master the topics one after another, striking them out from his table 
with ink as soon as they were done. " May the list soon get black, 
although at present I shall hardly be able, I am afraid, to spot the 
paper." Beneath the top skimmings of these years he afterward 
conceived seething depths working beneath the froth, but could 
give hardly any account of it. He undertook the practise of 
pharmacy, etc. 

Women with literary gifts perhaps surpass men in 
their power to reproduce and describe the great but so 
often evanescent ebullitions of this age; perhaps be- 
cause their later lives, on account of their more generic 
nature, depart less from this totalizing period, or be- 
cause, although it is psychologically shorter than in men, 
the necessities of earning a livelihood less frequently 
arrest its full development, and again because they are 
more emotional, and feeling constitutes the chief psychic 
ingredient of this stage of life, or they dwell more on 
subjective states. 

Manon Philipon (Madame Roland) was born in 1754. 
Her father was an engraver in comfortable circum- 
stances. Her earliest enthusiasm was for the Bible and 
Lives of the Saints, and she had almost a mania for 
reading books of any kind. In the corner of her 
father's workshop she would read Plutarch for hours, 

1 Life and Letters of Thomas H. Huxley, by his son Leonard Huxley. 
D. Apple ton and Co., New York, 190L 

158 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

dream of the past glories of antiquity, and exclaim, 
weeping, " Why was I not born a Greek? " She de- 
sired to emulate the brave men of old. 

Books and flowers aroused her to dreams of enthusiasm, romantic 
sentiment, and lofty aspiration. Finding that the French society 
afforded no opportunity for heroic living, in her visionary fervor she 
fell back upon a life of religious mysticism, and Xavier, Loyola, St. 
Elizabeth, and St. Theresa became her new idols. She longed to fol- 
low even to the stake those devout men and women who had borne 
obloquy, poverty, hunger, thirst, wretchedness, and the agony of a 
martyr's death for the sake of Jesus. Her capacities for self-sacrifice 
became perhaps her leading trait, always longing after a grand life 
like George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke. She was allowed at the age 
of eleven to enter a convent, where, shunning her companions, she 
courted solitude apart, under the trees, reading and thinking. 
Artificial as the atmosphere was here, it no doubt inspired her life 
with permanent tenderness of feeling and loftiness of purpose, and 
gave a mystic quality to her imagination. Later she experienced to 
the full revulsion of thought and experience which comes when doubt 
reacts upon youthful credulity. It was the age of the encyclopedia, 
and now she came to doubt her creed and even God and the soul, but 
clung to the Gospels as the best possible code of morals, and later 
realized that while her intellect had wandered her heart had remained 
constant. At seventeen she was, if not the most beautiful, perhaps 
the noblest woman in all France, and here the curtain must drop upon 
her girlhood. All her traits were, of course, set ofT by the great life 
she lived and the yet greater death she died. 

Gifted people seem to conserve their youth and to be 
all the more children, and perhaps especially all the more 
intensely adolescents, because of their gifts, and it is 
certainly one of the marks of genius that the plasticity 
and spontaneity of adolescence persists into maturity. 
Sometimes even its passions, reveries, and hoydenish 
freaks continue. In her '* Histoire de Ma Vie," it is 
plain that George Sand inherited at this age an unusual 
dower of gifts. She composed many and interminable 
stories, carried on day after day, so that her confidants 

159 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

tried to tease her by asking if the prince had got out 
of the forest yet, etc. She personated an echo and con- 
versed with it. Her day-dreams and plays were so 
intense that she often came back from the world of 
imagination to reality with a shock. She spun a weird 
zoological romance out of a rustic legend of la grande 
hete. 

When her aunt sent her to a convent, she passed a year of rebellion 
and revolt, and was the leader of les diables, or those who refused 
to be devout, and engaged in all wild pranks. At fifteen she became 
profoundly interested in the lives of the saints, although ridiculing 
miracles. She entered one evening the convent church for service, 
without permission, which was an act of disobedience. The mystery 
and holy charm of it penetrated her; she forgot everything outward 
and was left alone, and some mysterious change stole over her. She 
" breathed an atmosphere of ineffable sweetness " more with the mind 
than the senses; had a sudden indescribable perturbation; her eyes 
swam; she was enveloped in a white glunmer, and heard a voice mur- 
mur the words written under a convent picture of St. Augustine, 
Tolle, lege, and turned around thinking Mother Alicia spoke, but she 
was alone. She knew it was an hallucination, but saw that faith had 
laid hold of her, as she wished, by the heart, and she sobbed and 
prayed to the unknown God till a nun heard her groaning. At first 
her ardor impelled her not only to brave the jeers of her madcap 
club of harum-scarums and tomboys, but she planned to become a 
nun, until this feverish longing for a recluse life passed, but left her 
changed. ^ 

When she passed from the simple and Catholic faith of her gri- 
sette mother to the atmosphere of her cynical grandmother at 
Nohant, who was a disciple of Voltaire, she found herself in great 
straits between the profound sentiments inspired by the first com- 
munion and the concurrent contempt for this faith, instilled by her 
grandmother for all these mummeries through which, however, for 
conventional reasons she was obliged to pass. Her heart was deeply 
stirred, and yet her head holding all religion to be fiction or metaphor, 
it occurred to her to invent a story which might be a religion or a 
religion which might be a story into any degree of belief in which she 

1 See also Sully: A Girl's Religion. Longman's Magazine, May, 1890, 
pp. 89-99. 

160 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

could lapse at will. The name and the form of her new deity was 
revealed to her in a dream. He was Corambe, pure as Jesus, beauti- 
ful as Gabriel, as graceful as the nymphs and Orpheus, less austere 
than the Christian God, and as much woman as man, because she 
could best understand this sex from her love for her mother. He ap- 
peared in many aspects of physical and moral beauty ; was eloquent, 
master of all arts, and above all of the magic of musical improvisa- 
tion; loved as a friend and sister, and at the same time revered as a 
god; not awful and remote from impeccability, but with the fault of 
excess of indulgence. She estimated that she composed about a 
thousand sacred books or songs developing phases of his mundane 
existence. In each of these he became incarnate man on touching 
the earth, always in a new group of people who were good, yet suffer- 
ing martyrdoms from the wicked known only by the effects of their 
malice. In this ''gentle hallucination" she could lose herself in the 
midst of friends and turn to her hero deity for comfort. There must 
be not only sacred books, but a temple and ritual, and in a garden 
thicket, which no eye could penetrate, in a moss-carpeted chamber 
she built an altar against a tree-trunk, ornamented with a wreath 
hung over it. Instead of sacrificing, which seemed barbaric, she 
proceeded to restore life and liberty to butterflies, lizards, green 
frogs, and birds, which she put in a box, laid on the altar, and ''after 
having invoked the good genius of liberty and protection," opened 
it. In these mimic rites and delicious reveries she found the germs 
of a religion that fitted her heart. From the instant, however, that 
a boy playmate discovered and entered this sanctuary, "Corambe 
ceased to dwell in it. The dryads and the cherubim deserted it," 
and it seemed unreal. The temple was destroyed with great care, 
and the garlands and shells were buried under the tree. ^ 

' Sheldon (Institutional Activities of American Children; American 
Journal of Psychology, July, 1898, vol. 9, p. 434) describes a faintly anal- 
ogous case of a girl of eleven, who organized the worship of Pallas Athena 
on two flat rocks, in a deep ravine by a stream where a young sycamore 
grew from an old stump, as did Pallas from the head of her father Zeus. 
There was a court consisting of king, queen, and subjects, and priests 
who officiated at sacrifices. The king and queen wore goldenrod upon 
their heads and waded in streams attended by their subjects; gathered 
flowers for Athena; caught crayfish which were duly smashed upon her 
altar. "Sometimes there was a special celebration, when, in addition to 
the slaughtered crayfish and beautiful flower decorations, and pickles 
stolen from the dinner-table, there would be an elaborate ceremony," 
which because of its uncanny acts was intensely disliked by the people at 
hand. 

161 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

Louisa Alcott's romantic period opened at fifteen, 
when she began to write poetry, keep a heart journal, 
and wander by moonlight, and wished to be the Bettine 
of Emerson, in whose library she foraged; wrote him 
letters which were never sent; sat in a tall tree at 
midnight; left wild flowers on the doorstep of her mas- 
ter; sang Mignon's song under his window; and was 
refined by her choice of an idol. Her diary was all 
about herself. 

If she looked in the glass at her long hair and weU-shaped head, 
she tried to keep down her vanity; her quick tongue, moodiness, pov- 
erty, impossible longings, made every day a battle until she hardly 
wished to live, only something must be done, and waiting is so hard. 
She imagined her mind a room in confusion which must be put in 
order; the useless thought swept out; foolish fancies dusted away; 
newly furnished with good resolutions. But she was not a good 
housekeeper; cobwebs got in, and it was hard to rule. She was 
smitten with a mania for the stage, and spent most of her leisure in 
writing and acting plays of melodramatic style and high-strung 
sentiment, improbable incidents, with no touch of common life or 
sense of humor, full of concealments and surprises, bright dialogues, 
and lofty sentiments. She had much dramatic power and loved to 
transform herself into Hamlet and declaim in mock heroic style. 
From sixteen to twenty-three was her apprenticeship to life. She 
taught, wrote for the papers, did housework for pay as a servant, 
and found sewing a pleasant resource because it was tranquillizing, 
left her free, and set her thoughts going. 

Mrs. Burnett,* like most women who record their childhood and 
adolescent memories, is far more subjective and interesting than most 
men. In early adolescence she was never alone when with flowers, 
but loved to "speak to them, to bend down and say caressing things, 
to stoop and kiss them, to praise them for their pretty ways of look- 
ing up at her as into the eyes of a friend and beloved. There were 
certain little blue violets which always seemed to lift their small faces 
childishly, as if they were saying, 'Kiss me; don't go by like that.'" 
She would sit on the po^ch, elbows on knees and chin on hands, 
staring upward, sometimes lying on the grass. Heaven was so high 

1 The One I Know the Best of All. A Memory of the Mind of a Child. 
By Frances Hodgson Burnett. Scribner's Sons, New York, 1893. 

162 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

and yet she was a part of it and was something even among the stars. 
It was a weird, updrawn, overwhelming feeUng as she stared so 
fixedly and intently that the earth seemed gone, left far behind. 
Every hour and moment was a wonderful and beautiful thing. She 
felt on speaking terms with the rabbits. Something was happening 
in the leaves which waved and rustled as she passed. Just to walk, 
sit. lie around out of doors, to loiter, gaze, watch with a heart fresh 
as a young dryad, following birds, playing hide-and-seek with the 
brook — these were her halcyon hours. 

With the instability of genius, Beth^ did everything suddenly. 
When twelve or thirteen, she had grown too big to be carried, pulled 
or pushed; she suddenly stood still one day, when her mother com- 
manded her to dress. She had been ruled before by physical force, 
but her will and that of her mother were now in collision, and the 
latter realized she could make her do nothing unless by persuasion 
or moral influence. Being constantly reproved, scolded, and even 
beaten by her mother, Beth one day impulsively jumped into the sea, 
and was rescued with difficulty. She had spells of being miserable 
with no cause. She was well and happy, but would burst into tears 
suddenly, which seemed often to surprise her. Being very sensitive 
herself, she was morbidly careful of the feelings of others and in- 
cessantly committed grave sins of insincerity without compunction 
in her effort to spare them. To those who confided in her abilities, 
praised her, and thought she could do things, her nature expanded, 
but her mother checked her mental growth over and over, instead 
of helping her by saying, " Don't try, you can't do it," etc. 

Just before the dawn of adolescence she had passed through a long 
period of abject superstition, largely through the influence of a serv- 
ant. All the old woman's signs were very dominant in her life. She 
even invented methods of divination, as, "if the boards do not creak 
when I walk across the room I shall get through my lessons without 
trouble." She always preferred to see two rooks together to one 
and became expert in the black arts. She used to hear strange noises 
at night for a time, which seemed signs and portents of disaster at sea, 
fell into the ways of her neighbors, and had more faith in incantations 
than in doctors' doses. She not only heard voices and very ingeni- 
ously described them, but claimed to know what was going to happen 
and compared her forebodings with the maid. She ''got religion" 
very intensely under the influence of her aunt, grew thin, lost her 
appetite and sleep, had heartache to think of her friends burning in 
hell, and tried to save them. 

1 The Beth Book, by Sarah Grand. D. Appleton and Co., New 
York, 1897. 

163 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

Beth never thought at all of her personal appearance until she 
overheard a gentleman call her rather nice-looking, when her face 
flushed and she had a new feeling of surprise and pleasure, and took 
very clever ways of cross-examining her friends to find if she was 
handsome. All of a sudden the care of her person became of great 
importance, and every hint she had heard of was acted on. She aired 
her bed, brushed her hair glossy, pinched her waist and feet, washed 
in buttermilk, used a parasol, tortured her natural appetite in every 
way, put on gloves to do dirty work, etc. 

The house always irked her. Once stealing out of the school by 
night, she was free, stretched herself, drew a long breath, bounded 
and waved her arms in an ecstasy of liberty, danced around the mag- 
nolia, buried her face in the big flowers one after another and bathed 
it in the dew of the petals, visited every forbidden place, was par- 
ticularly attracted to the water, enjoyed scratching and making her 
feet bleed and eating a lot of green fruit. This liberty was most 
precious and all through a hot summer she kept herself healthy by 
exercise in the moonlight. This revived her appetite, and she ended 
these night excursions by a forage in the kitchen. Beth had times 
when she hungered for solitude and for nature. Sometimes she 
would shut herself in her room, but more often would rove the fields 
and woods in ecstasy. Coming home from school, where she had 
long been, she had to greet the trees and fields almost before she did 
her parents. She had a great habit of stealing out , often by the most 
dangerous routes over roofs, etc., at night in the moonlight, running 
and jumping, waving her arms, throwing herself on the ground, roll- 
ing over, walking on all-fours, turning somersaults, hugging trees, 
playing hide-and-seek with the shadow fairy-folk, now playing and 
feeling fear and running away. She invoked trees, stars, etc. 

Beth's first love affair was with a bright, fair-haired, fat-faced 
boy, who sat near her pew Sundays. They looked at each other 
once during service, and she felt a glad glow in her chest spread over 
her, dwelt on his image, smiled, and even the next day felt a new 
desire to please. She watched for him to pass from school. When 
he appeared, "had a most delightful thrill shoot through her." The 
first impulse to fly was conquered; she never thought a boy beautiful 
before. They often met after dark, wrote; finally she grew tired of 
him because she could not make him feel deeply, sent him off, called 
him an idiot, and then soliloquized on the *' most dreadful grief of her 
life." The latter stages of their acquaintance she occasionally used 
to beat him, but his attraction steadily waned. Once later, as she 
was suffering from a dull, irresolute feeling due to want of a com- 
panion and an object, she met a boy of seventeen, whose face, like her 

164 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

own, brightened as they approached. It was the first appearance of 
nature's mandate to mate. This friendly glance suffused her whole 
being with the " glory and vision of love." Rehgion and young men 
were her need. They had stolen interviews by night and many an 
innocent embrace and kiss, and almost died once by being caught. 
They planned in detail what they would do after they were married, 
but all was taken for granted without formal vows. Only when criti- 
cized did they ever dream of caution and concealment, and then they 
made elaborate parades of ignoring each other in public and fired their 
imaginations with thoughts of disguises, masks, etc. This passion 
was nipped in the bud by the boy's removal from his school. 

In preparing for her first communion, an anonymous writer ^ be- 
came sober and studious, proposing to model her Hfe on that of each 
fresh saint and to spend a week in retreat examining her conscience 
with a vengeance. She wanted to revive the custom of public con- 
fession and wrote letters of penitence and submission, which she tore 
up later, finding her mind not "all of a piece." She lay prostrate on 
her prie-dieu weeping from ecstasy, lying on the rim of heaven held 
by angels, wanting to die, now bathed in bliss or aching intolerably 
wdth spiritual joy, but she was only twelve and her old nature often 
reasserted itself. Religion at that time became an intense emotion 
nourished on incense, music, tapers, and a feeling of being tangible. 
It was rapturous and sensuous. While under its spell, she seemed 
to float and touch the wings of angels. Here solemn Gregorian chants 
are sung, so that when one comes back to earth there is a sense of 
hunger, deception, and self-loathing. Now she came to understand 
how so many sentimental and virtuous souls sought oblivion in the 
narcotic of religious excitement. Here, at the age of twelve, youth 
began and childhood ended with her book. 

Pathetic is the account of Helen Keller's effort to un- 
derstand the meaning of the word '' love " in its season.- 

Is it the sweetness of flowers? she asked. No, said her teacher. 
Is it the warm sun? Not exactly. It can not be touched, " ' but you 
feel the sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love, you 
would not be happy or want to play . ' The beautiful truth burst upon 
my mind. I felt that there were invisible lines stretched between my 

1 Autobiography of a Child. Hannah Lynch, W. Blackwood and 
Sons, London, 1899, p. 255. 

2 The Story of My Life. By Helen Keller. Doubleday, Page 
and Co., New York, 1903, p. 30. 

165 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

spirit and the spirit of others." This period seems to have come 
gradually and naturally to this wonderful child, whose life has been 
perhaps the purest ever lived and one of the sweetest. None has 
ever loved every aspect of nature accessible to her more passion- 
ately, or felt more keenly the charm of nature or of beautiful senti- 
ments. The unhappy Frost King episode has been almost the only 
cloud upon her life, which unfortunately came at about the dawn of 
this period, that is perhaps better marked by the great expansion of 
mind which she experienced at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, 
when she was thirteen. About this time, too, her great ambition of 
going to college and enjoying all the advantages that other girls did, 
which, considering her handicap, was one of the greatest human 
resolutions, was strengthened and deepened. The fresh, spontane- 
ous, and exquisite reactions of this pellucid mind, which felt that 
each individual could comprehend all the experiences and emotions 
of the race and that chafed at every pedagogical and technical ob- 
stacle between her soul and nature, and the great monuments of 
literature, show that she has conserved to a remarkable degree, 
which the world will wish may be permanent, the best impulses of 
this golden age. 

Marie Baslikirtseft'/ who may be taken as one of the 
best types of exaggerated adolescent confessionalists, 
was rich and of noble birth, and began in 1873, at the 
age of twelve, to write a journal that should be ab- 
solutely true and frank, with no pretense, affectation, 
or concealment. The journal continues until her death, 
October, 1884, at the age of twenty-three. It may be 
described as in some sense a feminine counterpart of 
Rousseau's confessions, but is in some respects a more 
precious psychological document than any other for the 
elucidation of the adolescent ferment in an unusually 
vigorous and gifted soul. Twice I have read it from 
cover to cover and with growing interest. 

At twelve she is passionately in love with a duke, whom she some- 
times saw pass, but who had no knowledge of her existence, and builds 

1 Journal of a Young Artist. Cassell and Co., New York, 1889, 
p. 434. 

166 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

many air castles about his throwing himself at her feet and of their 
life together. She prays passionately to see him again, would dazzle 
him on the stage, would lead a perfect life, develop her voice, and 
would be an ideal wife. She agonizes before the glass on whether 
or not she is pretty, and resolves to ask some young man, but prefers 
to think well of herself even if it is an illusion; constantly modulates 
over into passionate prayer to God to grant all her wishes; is op- 
pressed with despair; gay and melancholy by turn; believes in God 
because she prayed Him for a set of croquet and to help her to learn 
English, both of which He granted. At church some prayers and 
services seem directly aimed at her; Paris now seems a frightful 
desert, and she has no motive to avoid carelessness in her appearance. 
She has freaky and very changeable ideas of arranging the things 
in her room. When she hears of the duke's marriage she almost 
throws herself over a bridge, prays God for pardon of her sins, and 
thinks all is ended; finds it horrible to dissemble her feelings in 
public; goes through the torture of altering her prayer about the 
duke. She is disgusted with common people, harrowed by jealousy, 
envy, deceit, and every hideous feeling, yet feels herself frozen in 
the depth, and moving only on the surface. When her voice im- 
proves she welcomes it with tears and feels an all-powerful .queen. 
The man she loves should never speak to another. Her journal she 
resolves to make the most instructive book that ever was or ever will 
be written. She esteems herself so great a treasure that no one is 
worthy of her; pities those who think they can please her; thinks her- 
self a real divinity; prays to the moon to show her in dreams her 
future husband, and quarrels with her photographs. 

In some moods she feels herself beautiful, knows she shall succeed, 
everything smiles upon her and she is absolutely happy and yet in the 
next paragraph the fever of life at high pressure palls upon her and 
things seem asleep and unreal. Her attempts to express her feelings 
drive her to desperation because words are inadequate. She loves to 
weep, gives up to despair to think of death, and finds everything 
transcendently exquisite. She comes to despise men and wonder 
whether the good are always stupid and the intelligent always false 
and saturated with baseness, but on the whole believes that some 
time or other she is destined to meet one true good and great man. 
Now she is inflated with pride of her ancestry, her gifts, and would 
subordinate everybody and everything; she would never speak a 
commonplace word, and then again feels that her life has been a 
failure and she is destined to be always waiting. She falls on her 
knees sobbing, praying to God with outstretched hands as if He were 
in her room; almost vows to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem one- 
12 167 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

tenth of the way on foot; to devote her money to good works; lacks 
the pleasures proper to her age; wonders if she can ever love again. 
On throwing a bouquet from a window into a crowd in the Corso a 
young man choked so beautifully a workman who caught it that by 
that one act of strangling and snatching the bouquet she fell in love. 
The young man calls and they see each other often. Now she is clad 
from head to foot in an armor of cold politeness, now vanity and now 
passion seem uppermost in their meetings. She wonders if a certain 
amount of sin, like air, is necessary to a man to sustain life. Finally 
they vow mutual love and Pietro leaves, and she begins to fear that 
she has cherished illusions or been insulted; is tormented at things 
unsaid or of her spelling in French. She coughs and for three days 
has a new idea that she is going to die; prays and prostrates herself 
sixty times, one for each bead in her rosary, touching the floor with 
her forehead every time; wonders if God takes intentions into ac- 
count; resolves to read the New Testament, but can not find one and 
reads Dumas instead. In novel-reading she imagines herself the 
heroine of every scene ; sees her lover and they plan their mode of life 
together and at last kiss each other, but later she feels humiliated, 
chilled, doubts if it is real love; studies the color of her lips to see if 
they have changed; fears that she has compromised herself; has eye 
symptoms that make her fear blindness. Once on reading the 
Testament she smiled and clasped her hands, gazed upward, was no 
longer herself but in ecstasy; she makes many programs for life; is 
haunted by the phrase " We live but once " ; wants to live a dozen lives 
in one, but feels that she does not live one-fourth of a life; has several 
spells of solitary illumination. At other times she wishes to be the 
center of a salon and imagines herself to be so. She soars on poets' 
wings, but often has hell in her heart; slowly love is vowed henceforth 
to be a word without meaning to her. Although she suffers from 
ennui, she realizes that women live only from sixteen to forty and 
cannot bear the thought of losing a moment of her life ; criticizes her 
mother; scorns marriage and child-bearing, which any washerwoman 
can attain, but pants for glory; now hates, now longs to see new 
faces; thinks of disguising herself as a poor girl and going out to 
seek her fortunes; thinks her mad vanity is her devil; that her 
ambitions are justified by no results; hates moderation in anything, 
would have intense and constant excitement or absolute repose; at 
fifteen abandons her idea of the duke but wants an idol, and finally 
decides to live for fame; studies her shoulders, hips, bust, to gauge 
her success in life; tries target-shooting, hits every time and feels 
it to be fateful ; at times despises her mother because she is so easily 
influenced by her; meets another man whose affection for her she 

168 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

thinks might be as reverent as religion and who never profaned the 
purity of his hfe by a thought, but finally drops him because the possi- 
ble disappointment would be unbearable; finds that the more un- 
happy any one is for love of us the happier we are ; wonders why she 
has weeping spells; wonders what love that people talk so much about 
really is, and whether she is ever to know. One night, at the age of 
seventeen, she has a fit of despair, which vents itself in moans until 
arising, she seizes the dining-room clock, rushes out and throws it 
into the sea, when she becomes happy. "Poor clock!" 

At another time she fears she has used the word love lightly and 
resolves to no longer invoke God's help, yet in the next line prays 
Him to let her die as everything is against her, her thoughts are inco- 
herent, she hates herself and everything is contemptible; but she 
wishes to die peacefully while some one is singing a beautiful air of 
Verdi. Again she thinks of shaving her head to save the trouble of 
arranging her hair; is crazed to think that every moment brings her 
nearer death; to waste a moment of life is infamous, jet she can 
trust no one; all the freshness of life is gone; few things affect her 
now; she wonders how in the past she could have acted so foolishly 
and reasoned so wisely; is proud that no advice in the world could 
ever keep her from doing anything she wished. She thinks the 
journal of her former years exaggerated and resolves to be moderate; 
wants to make others feel as she feels; finds that the only cure for 
disenchantment with life is devotion to work ; fears her face is wear- 
ing an anxious look instead of the confident expression which was its 
chief charm. " Impossible " is a hideous, maddening word; to think 
of dying like a dog as most people do and leaving nothing behind is 
a granite wall against which she every instant dashes her head. If 
she loved a man, every expression of admiration for anything or any- 
body else in her presence would be a profanation. Now she thinks 
the man she loves must never know what it is to be in want of money 
and must purchase everything he wishes ; must weep to see a woman 
want for anything, and find the door of no palace or club barred to 
him. Art becomes a great shining light in her life of few pleasures 
and many griefs, yet she dares hope for nothing. 

At eighteen all her caprices are exhausted; she vows and prays in 
the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost for her wishes. She 
would like to be a millionaire, get back her voice, obtain the prix 
de Rome under the guise of a man and marry Napoleon IV. On 
winning a medal for her pictures she does nothing but laugh, cry, 
. and dream of greatness, but the next day is scolded and grows dis- 
couraged. She has an immense sense of growth and transformation, 
so that not a trace of her old nature remains ; feels that she has far too 

169 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

much of some things, and far too Httle of others in her nature; sees 
defects in her mother's character, whose pertinacity is Uke a disease ; 
reahzes that one of her chief passions is to inspire rather than to feel 
love; that her temper is profoundly affected by her dress; deplores 
that her family expect her to achieve greatness rather than give her 
the stimulus of expecting nothing; declares that she thinks a million 
thoughts for every word that she writes ; is disgusted with and some- 
times absolutely hates herself. At one time she coquets with Kant, 
and wonders if he is right that all things exist only in the imagina- 
tion; has a passion for such " abracadabrante follies" that seem so 
learned and logical, but is grieved to feel them to be false; longs to 
penetrate the intellectual world, to see, learn, and know everything; 
admires Balzac because he describes so frankly all that he has felt; 
loves Fleury, who has shown her a wider horizon; still has spells of 
admiring her dazzling complexion and deploring that she can not go 
out alone; feels that she is losing her grip on art and also on God, 
who no longer hears her prayers, and resolves to kill herself if she is 
not famous at thirty. 

At nineteen, and even before, she has spells of feeling inefficient, 
cries, calls on God, feels exhausted; is almost stunned when she hears 
that the young French prince about whom she has spun romances 
was killed by the Kafhrs; feels herself growing serious and sensible; 
despises death; realizes that God is not what she thought, but is 
perhaps Nature and Life or is perhaps Chance; she thinks out possible 
pictures she might paint; develops a Platonic friendship for her 
professor; might marry an old man with twenty-seven millions, but 
spurns the thought; finds herself growing deaf gradually, and at 
nineteen finds three gray hairs; has awful remorse for days, when she 
cannot work and so loses herself in novels and cigarettes; makes 
many good resolutions and then commits some folly as if in a dream; 
has spells of reviewing the past. When the doctor finds a serious 
lung trouble and commands iodine, cod-liver oil, hot milk, and 
flannel, she at first scorns death and refuses all, and is delighted at 
the terror of her friends, but gradually does all that is necessary ; feels 
herself too precocious and doomed; deplores especially that con- 
sumption will cost her her good looks; has fits of intense anger 
alternating with tears; concludes that death is annihilation; realizes 
the horrible thought that she has a skeleton within her that some 
time or other will come out; reads the New Testament again and re- 
turns to belief in miracles and prayer to Jesus and the Virgin; dis- 
tributes one thousand francs to the poor; records the dreamy 
delusions that flow through her brain at aight and the strange sensa- 
tions by day. Her eye symptoms cause her to fear blindness again; 

170 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

she grows superstitious, believing in signs and fortune-tellers ; is 
strongly impelled to embrace and make up with her mother; at times 
defies God and death; sees a Spanish bull-fight and gets from it a 
general impression of human cowardice, but has a strange intoxica- 
tion with blood and would like to thrust a lance into the neck of every- 
one she meets; coquets a great deal with the thought of marriage; 
takes up her art and paints a few very successful pictures; tries to 
grapple with the terrible question, "What is my unbiased opinion 
concerning myself? " pants chiefly for fame. When the other lung 
is found diseased the diary becomes sometimes more serious, some- 
times more fevered; she is almost racked to find some end in hfe; 
shall she marry, or paint? and at last finds much consolation in the 
visits of Bastien-Lepage, who comes to see her often while he is 
dying of some gastric trouble. She keeps up occasional and often 
daily entries in her journal until eleven days before her death, 
occurring in October, 1884, at the age of twenty-three, and precipi- 
tated by a cold incurred while making an open-air sketch. 

The confessional outpourings of Mary INIacLane ^ 
constitute a unique and valuable adolescent document, 
despite the fact that it seems throughout affected and 
written for effect; however, it well illustrates a real 
type, although perhaps hardly possible save in this coun- 
try, and was inspired very likely by the preceding. 

She announces at the outset that she is odd, a genius, an extreme 
egotist; has no conscience; despises her father, **Jim MacLane of 
selfish memory"; loves scrubbing the floor because it gives her 
strength and grace of body, although her daily life is an ''empty 
damned v/eariness." She is a female Napoleon passionately desiring 
fame; is both a philosopher and a coward; her heart is wooden; 
although but nineteen, she feels forty; desires happiness even more 
than fame, for an hour of which she would give up at once fame, 
money, power, virtue, honor, truth, and genius to the devil, whose 
coming she awaits. She discusses her portrait, which constitutes the 
frontispiece; is glad of her good strong body, and still awaits in a 
wild, frenzied impatience the coming of the devil to take her sacrifice, 
and to whom she would dedicate her life. She loves but one in all 

1 The Story of Mary MacLane. By herself. Herbert S. Stone 
and Ck)., Chicago, 1902, p. 322. 

171 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

the world, an older ''anemone" lady, once her teacher. She can 
not distinguish between right and wrong; love is the only thing real 
which will some day bring joy, but it is agony to wait. "Oh, 
damn! damn! damn! damn! every living thing in the world! — the 
universe be damned! " herself included. She is " marvelously deep," 
but thanks the good devil who has made her without conscience and 
virtue so that she may take her happiness when it comes. Her soul 
seeks but blindly, for nothing answers. How her happiness will 
seethe, quiver, writhe, shine, dance, rush, surge, rage, blare, and 
wreak with love and light when it comes! 

The devil she thinks fascinating and strong, with a will of steel, 
in conventional clothes, whom she periodically falls in love with and 
would marry, and would love to be tortured by him. She holds im- 
aginary conversations with him. If happiness does not come soon 
she will commit suicide, and she finds rapture in the thought of death. 
In Butte, Montana, where she lives, she wanders among the box 
rustlers, the beer jerkers, biscuit shooters, and plunges out into the 
sand and barrenness, but finds everything dumb. The six tooth- 
brushes in the bathroom make her wild and profane. She flirts 
with death at the top of a dark, deep pit, and thinks out the stages of 
decomposition if she yielded herself to Death, who would dearly 
love to have her. She confesses herself a thief on several occasions, 
but comforts herself because the stolen money was given to the poor. 
Sometimes her "very good legs" carry her out into the country, 
where she has imaginary love confabs with the devil, but the world 
is so empty, dreary, and cold, and it is all so hard to bear when one is 
a woman and nineteen. She has a litany from which she prays in 
recurrent phrases "Kind devil, deliver me" — as, e. g., from musk, 
boys with curls, feminine men, wobbly hips, red note-paper, codfish- 
balls, lisle-thread stockings, the books of A. C. Gunter and Albert 
Ross, wax flowers, soft old bachelors and widowers, nice young men, tin 
spoons, false teeth, thin shoes, etc. She does not seem real to herself, 
everything is a blank. Though she doubts everything else, she will 
keep the one atom of faith in love and the truth that is love and life 
in her heart. When something shrieks within her, she feels that all 
her anguish is for nothing and that she is a fool. She is exasperated 
that people call her peculiar, but confesses that she loves admiration ; 
she can fascinate and charm company if she tries; imagines an ad- 
miration for Messalina. She most desires to cultivate badness when 
there is lead in the sky. " I would live about seven years of judicious 
badness, and then death if you will." "I long to cultivate the 
element of badness in me." She describes the fascination of making 
and eating fudge; devotes a chapter to describing how to eat an olive; 

172 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

discusses her figure. "In the front of my shirt-vraist there are nine 
cambric handkerchiefs cunningly distributed." She discusses her 
foot, her beautiful hair, her hips; describes each of the seventeen little 
engraved portraits of Napoleon that she keeps, with each of which 
she falls in love ; vows she would give up even her marvelous genius 
for one dear, bright day free from loneliness. AVhen her skirts need 
sewing, she simply pins them ; this lasts longer, and had she mended 
them with needle and thread she would have been sensible, which 
she hates. As she walks over the sand one day she vows that she 
would like a man to come so be that he was strong and a perfect 
villain, and she would pray him to lead her to what the world calls 
her ruin. Nothing is of consequence to her except to be rid of unrest 
and pain. She would be positively and not merely negatively 
wicked. To poison her soul would rouse her mental power. ''Oh, 
to know just once what it is to be loved!" ''I know that I am a 
genius more than any genius that has lived," yet she often thinks 
herself a small vile creature for whom no one cares. The world is in- 
effably dull, heaven has always fooled her, and she is starving for love. 

Ada Negri illustrates the other extreme of genuineness and is 
desperately in earnest.^ She began to teach school in a squalid, 
dismal Italian village, and at eighteen to write the poetry that has 
made her famous. She lived in a dim room back of a stable, up two 
flights, where the windows were not glass but paper, and where she 
seems to have been, like her mother, a mill hand before she was a 
teacher. She had never seen a theater, but had read of Duse with 
enthusiasm; had never seen the sea, mountains, or even a hill, lake, 
or large city, but she had read of them. After she began to write, 
friends gave her two dream days in the city. Then she returned, 
put on her wooden shoes, and began to teach her eighty children to 
spell. The poetry she writes is from the heart of her own experience. 

She craved ''the kiss of genius and of light," but the awful figure 
of misfortune with its dagger stood by her bed at night. She writes : 

" I have no name — my home a hovel damp; 
I grew up from the mire; 
Wretched and outcast folk my family, 
And yet within me burns a flame of fire." 

There is always a praying angel and an evil dwarf on either side. 
The black abyss attracts her, yet she is softened by a child's caress. 

* Fate. Translated from the Italian by A. M. Von Blomberg. Cope- 
land and Day, Boston, 1898. 

173 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

she laughs at the blackest calamities that threaten her, but weeps over 
thin, wan children without bread. Her whole life goes into song. 
The boy criminal on the street fascinates her and she would kiss him. 
She writes of jealousy as a ghost of vengeance. If death comes, she 
fears ''that the haggard doctor will dissect my naked corpse," and 
pictures herself dying on the operating-table like a stray dog, and her 
well-made body " disgraced by the lustful kiss of the too eager blade " 
as, "with sinister smile untiring, they tear my bowels out and still 
gloat over my sold corpse, go on to bare my bones and veins at will, 
wrench out my heart," probe vainly for the secrets of hunger and the 
mystery of pain, until from her ''dead breast gurgles a gasp of male- 
diction." Much of her verse is imprecation. "A crimson rain of 
crying blood dripping from riddled chests" of those slain for liberty 
falls on her heart; the sultry factories where "monsters of steel, huge 
engines, snort all day," and where the pungent air poisons the blood 
of the pale weaver girls; the fate of the mason who fell from a high 
roof and struck the stone flagging, whose funeral she attends, all in- 
spire her to sing occasionally the songs of enfranchised labor. Misery 
as a drear, toothless ghost visits her, as when gloomy pinions had 
overspread her dying mother's bed, to wrench with sharp nails all the 
hope from her breast with which she had defied it. A wretched old 
man on the street inspires her to sing of what she imagines is his 
happy though humble prime. There is the song of the pickaxe 
brandished in revolution when mobs cry "Peace, labor, bread," and 
in mines of industry beneath the earth. She loves the "defeated" 
in whose house no fire glows, who live in caves and dens, and writes 
of the mutilation of a woman in the factory machinery. At eighteen 
years "a loom, two handsome eyes that know no tears, a cotton dress, 
a love, belong to me." She is inspired by a master of the forge beat- 
ing a red-hot bar, with his bare neck swelled. He is her demon, her 
God, and her pride in him is ecstasy. She describes jealousy of two 
rival women, so intense that they fight and bite, and the pure joy of 
a guileless, intoxicating, life-begetting first kiss. She longs for in- 
finite stretches of hot, golden sand, over which she would gallop 
wildly on her steed ; anticipates an old age of cap and spectacles ; 
revels in the hurricane, and would rise in and fly and whirl with it 
adrift far out in the immensity of space. She tells us, "Of genius and 
light I'm a blithe millionaire," and elsewhere she longs for the ever- 
lasting ice of lofty mountains, the immortal silence of the Alps; sings 
of her "sad twenty years," "how all, all goes when love is gone and 
spent." She imagines herself springing into the water which closes 
over her, while her naked soul, ghostly pale, whirls past through the 
lonely dale. She imprecates the licentious world of crafty burghers, 

174 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

coquettes, gamblers, well-fed millionaires, cursed geese and serpents 
that make the cowardly vile world, and whom she would smite in the 
face with her indignant verse. *'Thou crawlest and I soar." She 
chants the champions of the spade, hammer, pick, though they are 
ground and bowed with toil, disfigured within, with furrowed brows. 
She pants for war with outrage and with wTong; questions the abyss 
for its secret; hears moans and flying shudders; and sees phantoms 
springing from putrid tombs. The full moon is an old malicious spy, 
peeping stealthily with evil eye. She is a bird caught in a cursed 
cage, and prays some one to unlock the door and give her space and 
light, and let her soar away in ecstasy and glory. Nothing less than 
infinite space will satisfy her. Even the tempest, the demon, or a 
malevolent spirit might bear her away on unbridled wings. In one 
poem she apostrophizes Marie Bashkirtseff as warring with vast 
genius against unknown powers, but who now is in her coffin among 
worms, her skull grinning and showing its teeth. She would be 
possessed by her and thrilled as by an electric current. A dwarf 
beggar wrings her heart with pity, but she will not be overwhelmed. 
Though a daring peasant, she will be free and sing out her psean to the 
sun, though amid the infernal glow of furnaces, forges, and the ring- 
ing noise of hammers and wheels. 

Literary men who record their experiences during 
this stage seem to differ from women in several impor- 
tant respects. First, they write with less abandon. I 
can recall no male MacLanes. A Bashkirtseff would be 
less impossible, and a Negri with social reform in her 
heart is still less so. But men are more prone to char- 
acterize their public metamorphoses later in life, when 
they are a little paled, and perhaps feel less need of 
confessionalism for that reason. It would, however, be 
too hazardous to elaborate this distinction too far. Sec- 
ondly and more clearly, men tend to vent their ephebic 
calentures more in the field of action. They would 
break the old moorings of home and strike out new 
careers, or vent their souls in efforts and dreams of 
reconstructing the political, industrial, or social world. 
Their impracticabilities are more often in the field 
of practical life and remoter from their own immediate 

175 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

surroundings. This is especially true in our practical 
country, which so far lacks subjective characterizations 
of this age of eminent literary merit, peculiarly intense 
as it is here. Thirdly, they erupt in a greater variety of 
ways, and the many kinds of genius and talent that now 
often take possession of their lives like fate are more 
varied and individual. This affords many extreme con- 
trasts, as, e. g., between Trollope's pity for, and Goethe's 
apotheosis of his youth; Mill's loss of feeling, and Jef- 
feries's unanalytic, passionate outbursts of sentiment; 
the esthetic ritualism of Symonds, and the progressive 
religious emancipation of Fielding Hall; the moral and 
religious supersensitiveness of Oliphant, who was a rein- 
carnation of medieval monkhood, and the riotous 
storminess of Miiller and Ebers; the abnormalities and 
precocity of De Quincey, and the steady, healthful 
growth of Patterson, the simultaneity of a fleshly and 
spiritual love in Keller and Goethe, and the duality of 
Pater, with his great and tyrannical intensification of 
sensation for nature and the sequent mysticity and 
symbolism. In some it is fulminating but episodic, in 
others gradual and lifelong like the advent of eternal 
spring. Fourth, in their subjective states women out- 
grow less in their consciousness, and men depart farther 
from their youth, in more manifold ways. Lastly, in 
its religious aspects, the male struggles more with dogma, 
and his enfranchisement from it is more intellectually 
belabored. Y^et, despite all these differences, the anal- 
ogies between the sexes are probably yet more numerous, 
more all-pervasive. All these biographic facts reveal 
nothing not found in questionnaire returns from more 
ordinary youth, so that for our purposes they are only 
the latter, writ large because superior minds only utter 
what all more inwardly feel. The arrangement by na- 

176 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

tionality which follows gives no yet adequate basis for 
inference unless it be the above American peculiarity. 
In his autobiography from 1785-1803, De Quincey ^ 
remembered feeling that life was finished and blighted 
for him at the age of six, up to which time the influence 
of his sister three years older had brooded over him. 

His first remembrance, however, is of a dream of terrific grandeur 
before he was two, which seemed to indicate that his dream tend- 
encies were constitutional and not due to morphine, but the chill was 
upon the first glimpse that this was a world of evil. He had been 
brought up in great seclusion from all knowledge of poverty and op- 
pression in a silent garden with three sisters, but the rumor that a 
female servant had treated one of them rudely just before her death 
plunged him into early pessimism. He felt that little Jane would 
come back certainly in the spring with the roses, and he was glad that 
his utter misery with the blank anarchy and confusion which her 
death brought could not be completely remembered. He stole into 
the chamber where her corpse lay, and as he stood, a solemn wind, the 
saddest he ever heard, that might have swept the fields of mortality 
for a thousand centuries, blew, and that same hollow Memnonian wind 
he often had heard since, and it brought back the open summer window 
and the corpse. A vault above opened into the sky, and he slept and 
dreamed there, standing by her, he knew not how long; a worm that 
could not die was at his heart, for this was the holy love between 
children that could not perish. The funeral was full of darkness and 
despair for him, and after it he sought solitude, gazed into the 
heavens to see his sister till he was tired, and realized that he was 
alone. Thus, before the end of his sixth year, with a mind already 
adolescent, although with a retarded body, the minor tone of life 
became dominant and his awakening to it was hard. 

As a penniless schoolboy wandering the streets of London at night, 
he was on familiar and friendly terms of innocent relationship with 
a number of outcast women. In his misery they were to him simply 
sisters in calamity, but he found in them humanity, disinterested gen- 
erosity, courage, and fidelity. One night, after he had walked the 
streets for weeks with one of these friendless girls who had not com- 
pleted her sixteenth year, as they sat on the steps of a house, he grew 

1 Confessions of an Opium Eater. Part I. Introductory Narrative. 
(Cambridge Classics) 1896. 

177 



YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

very ill, and had she not rushed to buy from her slender purse cordials 
and tenderly ministered to and revived him, he would have died. 
Many years later he used to wander past this house, and he recalled 
with real tenderness this youthful friendship; he longed again to 
meet the "noble-minded Ann " with whom he had so often con- 
versed familiarly "more Socratico," whose betrayer he had vainly 
sought to punish, and yearned to hear from her in order to convey to 
her some authentic message of gratitude, peace, and forgiveness. 

His much older brother came home in his thirty-ninth year to die. 
He had been unmanageable in youth and his genius for mischief was 
an inspiration, yet he was hostile to everything pusillanimous, 
haughty, aspiring, ready to fasten a quarrel on his shadow for run- 
ning before, at first inclined to reduce his boy brother to a fag, but 
finally before his death became a great influence in his life. Prom- 
inent were the fights between De Quincey and another older brother 
on the one hand, and the factory crowd of boys on the other, a fight 
incessantly renewed at the close of factory hours, with victory now 
on one and now on the other side; fought with stones and sticks, 
where thrice he was taken prisoner, where once one of the factory 
women kissed him, to the great delight of his heart. He finally in- 
vented a kingdom like Hartley Coleridge, called Gom Broon. He 
thought first that it had no location, but finally because his brother's 
imaginary realm was north and he wanted wide waters between them, 
his was in the far south. It was only two hundred and seventy miles 
in circuit, and he was stunned to be told by his brother one day that 
his own domain swept south for eighty degrees, so that the distance 
he had relied on vanished. Here, however, he continued to rule for 
well or ill, raising taxes, keeping an imaginary standing army, fishing 
herring and selling the product of his fishery for manure, and ex- 
periencing how ''uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." He 
worried over his obligations to Gom Broon, and the shadow froze 
into reality, and although his brother's kingdom Tigrosylvania was 
larger, his was distinguished for eminent men and a history not to be 
ashamed of. A friend had read Lord Monboddo's view that men had 
sprung from apes, and suggested that the inhabitants of Gom Broon 
had tails, so that the brother told him that his subjects had not 
emerged from apedom and he must invent arts to eliminate the tails. 
They must be made to sit down for six hours a day as a beginning. 
Abdicate he would not, though all his subjects had three tails apiece. 
They had suffered together. Vain was his brother's suggestion that 
they have a Roman toga to conceal their ignominious appendages. 
He was greatly interested in two scrofulous idiots, who finally died, 
and feared that his subjects were akin to them. 

178 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

John Stuart Llill's Autobiography presents one of 
the most remarkable modifications of the later phases 
of adolescent experience. No boy ever had more dili- 
gent and earnest training than his father gave him or 
responded better. lie can not remember when he 
began to learn Greek, but was told that it was at the age 
of three. The list of classical authors alone that he 
read in the original, to say nothing of history, political, 
scientific, logical, and other works before he was twelve, 
is perhaps unprecedented in all history. He associated 
with his father and all his many friends on their own 
level, but modestly ascribes everything to his environ- 
ment, insists that in natural gifts he is rather below 
than above par, and declares that everything he did 
could be done by every boy of average capacity and 
healthy physical constitution. His father made the 
Greek virtue of temperance or moderation cardinal, and 
thought human life *' a poor thing at best after the 
freshness of youth and unsatisfied curiosity had gone 
by." He scorned " the intense " and had only con- 
tempt for strong emotion. 

In his teens Mill was an able debater and writer for the quarterlies, 
and devoted to the propagation of the theories of Bentham, Ricardo, 
and associationism. From the age of fifteen he had an object in life, 
viz., to reform the world. This gave him happiness, deep, perma- 
nent, and assured for the future, and the idea of struggling to promote 
utilitarianism seemed an inspiring program for life. But in the 
autumn of 1826, when he was twenty years of age, he fell into **a dull 
state of nerves," where he could no longer enjoy and what had pro- 
duced pleasure seemed insipid; ''the state, I should think, in which 
converts to Methodism usually are when smitten by their first ' con- 
viction of sin.' In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the 
question directly to myself: 'Suppose that all your objects in hfe 
were realized ; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which 
you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very 
instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?' And an 

179 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered. 'No.' At this 
my heart sank within me : the whole foundation on which my life was 
constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in 
the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and 
how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed 
to have nothing left to live for. At first I hoped that the cloud would 
pass away of itself, but it did not. A night's sleep, the sovereign 
remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke 
to a renewed consciousness of the woful fact. I carried it with me 
into all companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had 
power to cause me even a few minutes' oblivion of it. For some 
months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and thicker. The lines in 
Coleridge's ' Dejection ' — I was not then acquainted with them — 
exactly described my case : 

" ' A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, 
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief. 
Which finds no natural outlet or relief 
In word, or sigh, or tear.' 

"In vain I sought relief from mj^ favorite books, those memorials 
of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto 
drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or 
with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became per- 
suaded that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, 
had worn itself out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of 
what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my 
griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was. I 
felt, too, that mine was not an interesting or in anyway respectable 
distress. There was nothing in it to attract sympathy. Advice, if I 
had known where to seek it, would have been most precious. The 
words of Macbeth to the physician often occurred to my thoughts. 
But there was no one on whom I could build the faintest hope of 
such assistance. My father, to whom it would have been natural to 
me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person 
to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help. Everything con- 
vinced me that he had no knowledge of any such mental state as I 
was suffering from, and that even if he could be made to understand 
it, he was not the physician who could heal it. My education, which 
was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to the 
possibility of its ending in this result, and I saw no use in giving him 
the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was 
probably irremediable, and, at all events, beyond the power of his 
remedies. Of other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had 

180 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

any hope of making my condition intelligible. It was, however, 
abundantly intelligible to myself, and the more I dwelt upon it the 
more hopeless it appeared." 

He now saw what had hitherto seemed incredible, that the habit 
of analysis tends to wear away the feelings. He felt " stranded at the 
commencement of my voyage, w^ith a well-equipped ship and a 
rudder, but no. sail ; Avithout any real desire for the ends which I had 
been so carefully fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue, or the 
general good, but also just as little in anything else. The fountains 
of vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up within me as com- 
pletely as those of benevolence." His vanity had been gratified at 
too early an age, and, like all premature pleasures, they had caused 
indifference, until he despaired of creating any fresh association of 
pleasure with any objects of human desire. Meanwhile, dejected 
and melancholy as he was through the winter, he went on mechanic- 
ally with his tasks ; thought he found in Coleridge the first description 
of what he was feeling; feared the idiosyncrasies of his education had 
made him a being unique and apart, " I asked myself if I could or if 
I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. 
I generally answered to myself that I did not think I could possibly 
bear it beyond a year." But within about half that time, in reading 
a pathetic passage of how a mere boy felt that he could save his 
family and take the place of all they had lost, a vivid conception of 
the scene caine over him, and he was moved to tears. From that 
moment his burden grew lighter. He saw that his heart was not 
dead and that he still had some stuff left of which character and 
happiness are made; and although there were several later lapses, 
some of which lasted many months, he was never again as miserable 
as he had been. 

These experiences left him changed in two respects. He had a 
new theory of life, having much in common with the anti-self-con- 
sciousness theory of Carlyle. He still held happiness the end of life, 
but thought it must be aimed at indirectly and taken incidentally. 
The other change was that for the first time he gave its proper place 
to internal culture of the individual, especially the training of the 
feelings which became now cardinal. He realized and felt the power 
of poetry and art; was profoundly moved by music; fell in love with 
Wordsworth and with nature ; and his later depressions were best re- 
lieved by the power of rural beauty, which wrought its charm not 
because of itself but by the states and feelings it aroused. His ode 
on the intimations of immortality showed that he also had felt that 
the first freshness of youthful joy was not lasting, and had sought 
and found compensation. He had thus come to a very different 

181 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

standpoint from that of his father, who had up to this time formed 
his mind and Ufe, and developed on this basis his unique individuaUty. 

Jefferies, when eighteen, began his '' Story of My 
Heart, ' ' ^ which he said was an absolutely true confes- 
sion of the stages of emotion in a soul from which all 
traces of tradition and learning were erased, and which 
stood face to face with nature and the unknown. 

His heart long seemed dusty and parched for want of feeling, 
and he frequented a hill, where the pores of his soul opened to a new 
air. " Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the 
sun, the air, and the distant sea. ... I desired to have its strength, 
its mystery and glory. I addressed the sun, desiring the sole equiva- 
lent of his light and brilliance, his endurance, and unwearied race. I 
turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its 
exquisite color and sweetness. The rich blue of the unobtainable 
flower of the sky drew my soul toward it, and there it rested, for 
pure color is the rest of the heart. By all these I prayed. I felt an 
emotion of the soul beyond all definition; prayer is a puny thing to 
it." He prayed by the thyme; by the earth; the flowers which he 
touched ; the dust which he let fall through his fingers ; was filled with 
"a, rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus I prayed. . . . 
I hid my face in the grass ; I was wholly prostrated ; I lost myself in the 
wTestle. ... I see now that what I labored for was soul life, more 
soul learning." After gazing upward he would turn his face into the 
grass, shutting out everything with hands each side, till he felt down 
into the earth and was absorbed in it, whispering deep down to its 
center. Every natural impression, trees, insects, air, clouds, he used 
for prayer, "that my soul might be more than the cosmos of life." 
His "LjTa" prayer was to live a more exalted and intense soul life; 
enjoy more bodily pleasure and live long and find power to execute 
his designs. He often tried, but failed for years to write at least a 
meager account of these experiences. He felt himself immortal just 
as he felt beauty. He w^as in eternity already; the supernatural is 
only the natural misnamed. As he lay face down on the grass, seizing 
it with both hands, he longed for death, to be burned on a pyre of pine 
wood on a high hill, to have his ashes scattered wide and broadcast, 
to be thrown into the space he longed for while living, but he feared 
that such a luxury of resolution into the elements would be too costly, 
Thus his naked mind, close against naked mother Nature, wrested 

1 Longmans, Green and Co. London, 1891, 2nd ed. 

182 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

from her the conviction of soul, immortality, deity, under conditions 
as primitive as those of the cave man, and his most repeated prayer 
was, "Give me the deepest soul life." 

In other moods he felt the world outre-human, and his mind could 
by no twist be fitted to the cosmos. Ugly, designless creatures 
caused him to cease to look for deity in nature, where all happens by 
chance. He at length concluded there is something higher than soul 
and above deity, and better than God, for which he searched and 
labored. He found favorite thinking places, to which he made 
pilgrimages, where he ''felt out into the depths of the ether." His 
frame could not bear the labor his heart demanded. Work of body 
was his meat and drink. "Never have I had enough of it. I 
wearied long before I was satisfied, and weariness did not bring a 
cessation of desire, the thirst was still there. I rode; I used the ax; 
I split tree-trunks with wedges; my arms tired, but my spirit re- 
mained fresh and chafed against the physical weariness." Had he 
been indefinitely stronger, he would have longed for more strength. 
He was often out of doors all daj^ and often half the night; wanted 
more sunshine ; wished the day was sixty hours long ; took pleasure in 
braving the cold so that it should be not life's destroyer but its re- 
newer. Yet he abhorred asceticism. He wrestled with the problem 
of the origin of his soul and its destiny, but could find no solution; 
revolted at the assertion that all is designed for the best; "a man of 
intellect and humanity could cause everything to happen in an in- 
finitely superior manner." He discovered that no one ever died of 
old age, but only of disease; that we do not even know what old age 
would be like; found that his soul is infinite, but lies in abeyance; 
that we are murdered by our ancestors and must roll back the tide 
of death; that a hundredth part of man's labor would suffice for his 
support; that idleness is no evil; that in the future nine-tenths of the 
time will be leisure, and to that end he will work with all his heart. 
"I was not more than eighteen when an inner and esoteric meaning 
began to come to me from all the visible universe, and indefinable 
aspirations filled me." 

Interesting as is this document, it is impossible to avoid the sus- 
picion that the seventeen years which intervened between the begin- 
ning of these experiences and their final record, coupled with the 
perhaps unconscious tendency toward literary effect, detract more or 
less from their value as documents of adolescent nature. 

Mr. H. Fielding Hall, author of " The Soul of a 
People, ' ' has since written a book ^ in which, beginning 

1 The Hearts of Men. Macmillan, London, 1891, p. 324. 

13 183 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

with many definitions of Christianity, weighing the opin- 
ion of those who think all our advance is made because 
of, against those who think it in spite of Christianity, 
he proceeds to give the story of a boy, probably himself, 
who till twelve was almost entirely reared by women 
and with children younger than himself. 

He was sickly, and believed not in the Old but in the New Testa- 
ment; in the Sermon on the Mount, which he supposed all accepted 
and Uved by; that war and wealth were bad and learning apt to be 
a snare; that the ideal life was that of a poor curate, working hard 
and unhappy. At twelve, he went to a boarding-school, passed from 
a woman's world into a man's, out of the New Testament into the 
Old, out of dreams into reality. War was a glorious opportunity, and 
all followed the British victories, which were announced publicly. 
Big boys were going to Sandhurst or Woolwich; there were parties; 
and the school code never turned the other cheek. Wars were God's 
storms, stirring stagnant natures to new life ; wealth was worshiped ; 
certain lies were an honor; knowledge was an extremely desirable 
thing — all this was at first new and delightful, but extremely wicked. 
Sunday was the only other Old Testament rule, but was then for- 
gotten. Slowly a repugnance of religion in all its forms arose. He 
felt his teachers hypocrites; he raised no alarm, "for he was hardly 
conscious that his anchor had dragged or that he had lost hold" of it 
forever. At eighteen, he read Darwin and found that if he were 
right, Genesis was wrong; man had risen, not fallen; if a part was 
wrong, the whole was. If God made the world, the devil seemed to 
rule it ; prayer can not influence him ; the seven days of creation were 
periods, Heaven knows how long. Why did all profess and no one 
believe religion? Why is God so stern and yet so partial, and how 
about the Trinity? Then explanations were given. Heaven grew 
repulsive, as a place for the poor, the maimed, the stupid, the child- 
ish, and those unfit for earth generally. 

Faiths came from the East. ''The North has originated only 
Thor, Odin, Balder, Valkyres." The gloom and cold drive man into 
himself; do not open him. In the East one can live in quiet solitude, 
with no effort, close to nature. The representatives of all faiths wear 
ostentatiously their badges, pray in public, and no one sneers at all 
religions. Oriental faiths have no organization; there is no head of 
Hinduism, Buddhism, or hardly of Mohammedanism. There are no 
missions, but religion grows rankly from a rich soil, so the boy wrote 

184 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

three demands: a reasonable theon^ of the universe, a workable and 
working code of conduct, and a promise of something desirable here- 
after. So he read books and tried to make a system. 

On a hill, in a thunder-storm in the East, he realized how Thor 
was born. Man fears thunder; it seems the voice of a greater man. 
Deny eyes, legs, and body of the Deity, and nothing is left. God as 
an abstract spirit is unthinkable, but Buddhism offers us no God, 
only law. Necessity, blind force, law, or a free personal will — that is 
the alternative. Freedom limits omnipotence; the two can never mix. 
"The German Emperor's God, clanking round the heavenly mansions 
wearing a German Pickelhaube and swearing German oaths," is not 
satisfactory. Man's God is what he admires most in himself; he 
can be propitiated, hence atonement ; you can not break a law, but 
you can study it. Inquiry, not submission, is the attitude. Perhaps 
both destiny and freedom are true, but truth is for the sake of 
light. 

Thor had no moral code; the Greeks were unmoral. Jehovah at 
first asked only fear, reverence, and worship. This gives no guide 
to life. Most codes are directed against a foe and against pain. 
Truth, mercy, courtesy — these were slowly added to reverence ; then 
sanitary rules, hence castes. Two codes, those of Christ and Buddha, 
tower above all others. They are the same in praising not wealth, 
greatness, or power, but purity, renunciation of the world, as if one 
fitted one's self for one by being unfitted for the other world. 

Is heaven a bribe? Its ideals are those of children, of girl angels, 
white wings, floating dresses, no sheep, but lambs. "Surely there is 
nothing in all the world so babyish." One can hardly imagine a man 
with a deep voice, with the storm of life beating his soul, amid those 
baby faces. If happiness in any act or attitude is perfect, it will last 
forever. Where is due the weariness or satiety? But if happiness 
be perfect, this is impossible; so life would be monotony akin to 
annihilation. But life is change, and change is misery. There is 
effort here; but there will be none in the great peace that passes 
understanding; no defeat, therefore no victory; no friends, because no 
enemies; no joyous meetings, because no farewells. It is the shadows 
and the dark mysteries that sound the depths of our hearts. No man 
that ever lived, if told that he could be young again or go to any 
heaven, would choose the latter. Men die for many things, but all 
fear the beyond. Thus no religion gives us an intelligible First Cause, 
a code or a heaven that we want. The most religious man is the 
peasant listening to the angelus, putting out a little ghi for his God; 
the woman crying in the pagoda. Thus we can only turn to the 
hearts of men for the truth of religion. 

185 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

Biographies and autobiographies furnish many pho- 
tographic glimpses of the struggles and experiences of 
early adolescent years. 

Anthony Trollope's autobiography * is pitiful. He was poor and 
disliked by most of his masters and treated with ignominy by his 
fellow pupils. He describes himself as always in disgrace. At fifteen 
he walked three miles each way twice a day to and from school. As a 
sizar he seemed a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from the dunghill, 
sitting next the sons of big peers. All were against him, and he was 
allowed to join no games, and learned, he tells us, absolutely nothing 
but a little Greek and Latin. Once only, goaded to desperation, he 
rallied and whipped a bully. The boy was never able to overcome the 
isolation of his school position, and while he coveted popularity with an 
eagerness which was almost mean, and longed exceedingly to excel 
in cricket or with the racquet, was allowed to know nothing of them. 
He remembers at nineteen never to have had a lesson in writing, 
arithmetic, French, or German. He knew his masters by their 
ferules and they him. He believes that he has " been flogged oftener 
than any human being alive." ''It was just possible to obtain five 
scourgings in one day at Winchester, and I have often boasted that I 
have obtained them all." Prizes were distributed prodigally, but 
he never got one. For twelve years of tuition, he says, "I do not 
remember that I ever knew a lesson." 

At this age he describes himself as "an idle, desolate, hanger-on 
. . . without an idea of a career or a profession or a trade," but he 
was tolerably happy because he could fancy himself in love with 
pretty girls and had been removed from the real misery of school, but- 
had not a single aspiration regarding his future. Three of his house- 
hold were dying of consumption, and his mother was day nurse, 
night nurse, and divided her time between pill-boxes and the ink- 
bottle, for when she was seventy-six she had written one hundred 
and forty volumes, the first of which was not written till she was fiftj'-. 

Gradually the boy became alive to the blighted ambition of his 
father's life and the strain his mother was enduring, nursing the 
dying household and writing novels to provide a decent roof for them 
to die under. Anthony got a position at the post-office without an 
examination. He knew no French nor science; was a bad speller 
and worse writer and could not have sustained an examination on 
any subject. Still he could not bear idleness, and was always going 

» An Autobiography. Edited by H. M. TroUope. 2 vols. London, 
1883. 

186 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

about with some castle in the air firmly built in his mind, carrying on 
for weeks and years the same continuous story; binding himself down 
to certain laws, proprieties, and unities; always his own hero, ex- 
cluding everything violently improbable. To this practise, which he 
calls dangerous and which began six or seven years before he went to 
the post-office, he ascribes his power to maintain an interest in a fic- 
titious story and to live in an entirely outside imaginative life. 
During these seven years he acquired a character of irregularity and 
grew reckless. 

Mark Pattison ^ shows us how his real life began in the middle 
teens, when his energy was ''directed to one end, to improve myself"; 
"to form my own mind; to sound things thoroughly; to be free from 
the bondage of unreason and the traditional prejudices which, when 
I first began to think, constituted the whole of my mental fabric." 
He entered upon life with a ''hide-bound and contracted intellect," 
and depicts "something of the steps by which I emerged from that 
frozen condition." He believes that to "remember the dreams and 
confusions of childhood and never to lose the recollection of the curi- 
osity and simplicity of that age, is one of the great gifts of the poetic 
character," although this, he tells us, was extraordinarily true of 
George Sand, but not of himself. From the age of twelve on, a Fel- 
lowship at Oriel was the ideal of his life, and although he became a 
commoner there at seventeen, his chief marvel is that he was so im- 
mature and unimpressionable. 

William Hale White ^ learned little at school, save Latin and good 
penmanship, but his very life was divided into halves — Sundays 
and week days — and he reflects at some length upon the immense dan- 
gers of the early teens ; the physiological and yet subtler psychic pen- 
alties of error; callousness to fine pleasures; hardening of the con- 
science ; and deplores the misery which a little instruotion might have 
saved him. At fourteen he underwent conversion, understood in his 
sect to be a transforming miracle, releasing higher and imprisoning 
lower powers. He compares it to the saving of a mind from vice by 
falling in love with a woman who is adored, or the reclamation of a 
young woman from idleness and vanity by motherhood. But as a 
boy he was convinced of many things which were mere phrases, and 
attended prayer-meetings for the clanship of being marked off from 

iSee his Memoirs. London, 1885. 

2 See Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (pseudonym for W. H. 
White), edited by Reuben Shapcott. 2 vols. London, 188L 

187 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

the world and of walking home with certain girls. He learned to say 
in prayer that there was nothing good in him, that he was rotten and 
filthy and his soul a mass of putrefying sores ; but no one took him at 
his word and expelled him from society, but thought the better of 
him. Soon he began to study theology, but found no help in sup- 
pressing tempestuous lust, in understanding the Bible, or getting his 
doubts answered, and all the lectures seemed irrelevant chattering. 
An infidel was a monster whom he had rarely ever seen. At nineteen 
he began to preach, but his heart was untouched till he read Words- 
worth's lyrical ballads, and this recreated a living God for him, 
melted his heart to tears, and made him long for companionship; its 
effect was instantly seen in his preaching, and soon made him slightly 
suspected as heretical. ^ 

John Addington Symonds, in his autobiography, describes his "in- 
sect-like" devotion to creed in the green infancy of ritualism. In his 
early teens at boarding-school he and his mates, with half sincerity, 
followed a classmate to compline, donned surplices, tossed censers, 
arranged altars in their studies, bought bits of painted glass for their 
windows and illuminated crucifixes with gold dust and vermilion. 
When he was confirmed, this was somewhat of an epoch. Prepara- 
tion was like a plowshare, although it turned up nothing valuable, 
and stimulated esthetic and emotional ardor. In a dim way he felt 
God near, but he did not learn to fling the arms of the soul in faith 
around the cross of Christ. Later the revelation he found in Plato 
removed him farther from boyhood. He fell in love with gray 
Gothic churches, painted glass, organ lofts, etc. 

Walter Pater has described phases of ferment, perhaps largely his 
own, in the character of Florian Deleal; his rapture of the red haw- 
thorn blossoms, "absolutely the reddest of all things"; his times of 
"seemingly exclusive predominance of interest in beautiful physical 
things, a kind of tyranny of the senses"; and his later absorbing 
efforts to estimate the proportion of the sensuous and ideal, assigning 
most importance to sensible vehicles and occasions; associating all 
thoughts with touch and sight as a link between himself and things, 

1 The rest of the two volumes is devoted to his further life as a dis- 
senting minister, who later became something of a literary man; relating 
how he was slowly driven to leave his little church, how he outgrew and 
broke with the girl to whom he was engaged, whom he marvelously met 
and married when both were well on in years, and how strangely he was 
influenced by the free-thinker Mardon and his remarkable daughter. 
All in all it is a rare study of emancipation. 

188 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

till he became more and more "unable to care for or think of soul 
but as in an actual body"; comforted in the contemplation of death 
by the thought of flesh turning to violets and almost oppressed by the 
pressure of the sensible world, his longings for beauty intensifying 
his fear of death. He loved to gaze on dead faces in the Paris Morgue 
although the haunt of them made the sunshine sickly for days, and 
his long fancy that they had not really gone nor were quite motion- 
less, but led a secret, half fugitive life, freer by night, and perhaps 
dodging about in their old haunts with no great good-will toward the 
living, made him by turns pity and hate the ghosts who came back 
in the wind, beating at the doors. His religious nature gradually 
yielded to a mystical belief in Bible personages in some indefinite 
place as the reflexes and patterns of our nobler self, whose companion- 
ship made the world more satisfying. There was "a constant sub- 
stitution of the typical for the actual," and angels might be met any- 
where. ''A deep mysticity brooded over real meetings and partings," 
marriages, and many acts and accidents of life. ''The very colors 
of things became themselves weighty with meanings," or "full of 
penitence and peace." "For a time he walked through the world in 
a sustained, not unpleasurable awe generated by the habitual recogni- 
tion, beside every circumstance and event of life, of its celestial 
correspondent." 

In D. C. Boulger's Life of General Charles Gordon ^ he records 
how, like Nelson Clive, his hero was prone to boys' escapades and 
outbreaks that often made him the terror of his superiors. He was 
no bookworm, but famous as the possessor of high spirits, very 
often involved in affairs that necessitated discipline, and seemed 
greatly out of harmony with the popular idea of the ascetic of Mount 
Carmel. As a schoolboy he made wonderful squirts "that would 
wet you through in a minute." One Sunday twenty-seven panes of 
glass in a large storehouse were broken with screws shot through 
them by his cross-bow "for ventilation." Ringing bells and pushing 
young boys in, butting an unpopular officer severely in the stomach 
with his head and taking the punishment, hitting a bully with a 
clothes-brush and being put back six months in the Royal Military 
Academy at Woolwich ; these are the early outcrops of one side of his 
dual character. Although more soldier than saint, he had a very 
cheery, genial side. He was always ready to take even the severest 
punishment for all his scrapes due to excessive high spirits. When 
one of his superiors declared that he would never make an officer, he 

1 London, 1896, vol. 1. 
189 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

felt his honor touched, and his vigorous and expressive reply was to 
tear the epaulets from his shoulders and throw them at his superior's 
feet. He had already developed some of the rather moody love of 
seclusion that was marked later, but religion did not strike him 
deeply enough to bring him into the church until he was twenty-one, 
when he took his first sacrament. On one occasion he declined 
promotion within his reach because he would have had to pass a 
friend to get it. He acted generally on his impulses, which were 
perhaps better than his judgments, took great pleasure in correspond- 
ing on religious topics with his elder sister, and early formed the habit 
of excessive smoking which gravely affected his health later. His 
was the rare combination of inner repose and confidence, inter- 
rupted by spells of gaiety. 

Williamson, in his " Life of Holman Hunt," * tells us that at thirteen 
he was removed from school as inapt in study. He began to spend 
his time in drawing in his copybooks. He was made clerk to an 
auctioneer, who fortunately encouraged his passion, and at sixteen 
was with a calico printer. Here he amused himself by drawing flies 
on the window, which his employer tried to brush off. There was the 
greatest home opposition to his studying art. After being rejected 
twice, he was admitted at seventeen to the Academy school as a pro- 
bationer, and the next year, in 1845, as a student. Here he met 
Millais and Rossetti and was able to relieve the strain on his mind, 
which the worry of his father concerning his course caused him, and 
very soon his career began. 

At thirteen Fitzjames Stephen^ roused himself to thrash a big 
boy who had long bullied him, and became a fighter. In his sixteenth 
year, he grew nearly five inches, but was so shy and timid at Eton 
that he says, " I was like a sensible grown-up woman among a crowd 
of rough boys"; but in the reaction to the long abuse his mind was 
steeled against oppression, tyranny, and every kind of unfairness. 
He read Paine's " Age of Reason," and went " through the Bible as a 
man might go through a wood, cutting down trees. The priests can 
stick them in again, but they will not make them grow." 

Dickens has given us some interesting adolescents. 
Miss Dingwall in ' ' Sketches by Boz, " " very sentimental 

iMacmillan, 1902. 

2 Life of Sir J. F. Stephen. By his brother, Leslie Stephen. Lon- 
don, 1895. 

190 



■ BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

and romantic "; the tempery young Nickleby, who, at 
nineteen, thrashed Squeers; Barnaby Rudge, idiotic and 
very muscular; Joe Willet, persistently treated as a boy 
till he ran away to join the army and married Dolly Var- 
den, perhaps the most exuberant, good-humored, and 
beautiful girl in all the Dickens gallery ; Martin Chuzzle- 
wit, who also ran away, as did David Copperfield, per- 
haps the most true to adolescence because largely reminis- 
cent of the author 's own life ; Steerf orth, a stranger from 
home, and his victim. Little Emily; and to some extent 
Sam Weller, Dick Swiveller, the Marchioness, young Pod- 
snap, the Artful Dodger, and Charley Bates; while Oli- 
ver Twist, Little Nell, and Little Dorrit, Joe and Turvey- 
drop in Bleak House, and Paul Dombey, young as they 
were, show the beginning of the pubescent change. Most 
of his characters, however, are so overdrawn and carica- 
tured as to be hardly true to life.^ 

In the ' ' Romance of John Inglesant, " ^ by J. H. 
Shorthouse, we have a remarkable picture of an unusually 
gifted youth, who played an important role in the days 
of Cromwell and King Charles, and who was long 
poised in soul between the Church of Rome and the 
English party. He was very susceptible to the fascina- 
tion of superstition, romance, and day-dreaming, and 
at eleven absorbed his master's Rosicrucian theories of 
spiritual existence where spirits held converse with each 
other and with mankind. A mystic Platonism, which 
taught that Pindar's story of the Argo was only a 
recipe for the philosopher's stone, fascinated him at 



1 See the very impressive account of Dickens's characterization of 
childhood and youth, and of his great but hitherto inadequately recog- 
nized interest and influence as an educator. Dickens as an Educator. 
James L. Hughes. D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1901, p. 319. 

2 John Inglesant: A Romance. 6th ed. Macmillan, 1886. 

191 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

fourteen. The philosophy of obedience and of the sub- 
jection of reason to authority was early taught him, 
and he sought to live from within, hearing only the 
divine law, as the worshipers of Cybele heard only the 
flutes. His twin brother Eustace was an active world- 
ling, and soon he followed him to court as page to the 
Queen, but delighted more and more in wandering apart 
and building air castles. For a time he was entirely 
swayed, and his life directed, by a Jesuit Father, who 
taught him the crucifix and the rosary. At sixteen the 
doctrine of divine illumination fascinated him. He 
struggled to find the path of true devotion; abandoned 
himself to extremely ritualistic forms of worship; dab- 
bled a little in alchemy and astrology to help develop 
the divine nature within him and to attain the beatific 
vision. Soon he was introduced to the '' Protestant 
nunnery," as it w^as called, where the venerable Mr. 
Ferran, a friend of George Herbert's, was greatly taken 
by Inglesant's accomplishments and grace of manner. 
Various forms of extremely High Church yet Protestant 
worship were celebrated here each day with great devo- 
tion, until he became disgusted with Puritanism and 
craved to participate in the office of mass. At this point, 
however, he met Mr. Hobbes, whose rude but forcible 
condemnation of papacy restrained him from casting his 
lot with it. At seventeen, he saw one night a real ap- 
parition of the just executed Strafi^ord. The last act 
of his youth, which we can note here, was soon after he 
was twenty, when he fell in love with the charming 
and saintly Mary Collet. The rough Puritan Thorne 
had made her proposals at which she revolted, but she 
and Inglesant confessed love to each other; she saw, 
however, that they had a way of life marked out for 
themselves by an inner impulse and light. This call- 

192 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

ing they must follow and abandon love, and now John 
plunged into the war on the side of the King. 

W. J. Stillman ^ has written with unusual interest 
and candor the story of his own early life. 

As a boy he was frenzied at the first sight of the sea; caught 
the whip and lashed the horses in an unconscious delirium, and 
always remembered this as one of the most vivid experiences of 
his life. He had a period of nature worship. His first trout 
was a delirium, and he danced about wildly and furiously. He 
relates his very vivid impressions of the religious orthodoxy in 
which he was reared, especially revival sermons; his occasional 
falsehoods to escape severe punishment; his baptism at ten or 
eleven in a river in midwinter; the somberness of his intellectual 
life, which was long very apathetic; his phenomenal stupidity for 
years; his sudden insurrections in which he thrashed bullies at 
school; his fear that he should be sent home in disgrace for bad 
scholarship; and how at last, after seven years of dulness, at the 
age of fourteen, "the mental fog broke away suddenly, and before 
the term ended I could construe the Latin in less Mme than it 
took to recite it, and the demonstrations of Euclid were as plain 
and clear as a fairy story. My memory came back so distinctly 
that I could recite long poems after a single reading, and no member 
of the class passed a more brilliant examination at the end of the term 
than I; and, at the end of the second term, I could recite the whole 
of Legendre's geometrj^, plane and spherical, from beginning to end 
without a question, and the class examination was recorded as the 
most remarkable which the academy had witnessed for many years. 
I have never been able to conceive an explanation of this curious 
phenomenon, which I record only as of possible interest to some one 
interested in psychology." 

A. Bronson Alcott^ was the son of a Connecticut farmer. He 
began a diary at twelve; aspired vainly to enter Yale, and after much 
restlessness at the age of nineteen left home with two trunks for 
Virginia to peddle on foot, hoping to teach school. Here he had a 
varying and often very hard experience for years. 

1 The Autobiography of a Journalist. 2 vols. Houghton, Mifflin 
and Co., Boston, 1901. 

2 A. Bronson Alcott, His Life and Philosophy. By F. B. Sanborn and 
W. T. Harris. Roberts Bros., Boston, 1893. 

193 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

Horace Bushnell's ^ parents represented the Episcopal and liberal 
Congregational Church. His early life was spent on a farm and in 
attending a country academy. He became profoundly interested in 
religion in the early teens and developed extreme interest in nature. 
At seventeen, while tending a carding machine, he wrote a paper 
on Calvinism. At nineteen he united with the church, and entered 
Yale when he was twenty-one, in 1823. Later he tried to teach 
school, but left it, declaring he would rather lay stone wall; worked 
on a journal, but withdrew, finding it a terrible life; studied law for a 
year, became a tutor at Yale, experienced a reconversion and entered 
the ministry. 

A well-known American, who wishes his name with- 
held, writes me of his youth as follows: 

''First came the love of emotion and lurid romance reading. My 
mind was full of adventure, dreams of underground passages, and 
imprisoned beauties whom I rescued. I wrote a story in red ink, 
which I never read, but a girl friend did, and called it magnificent. 
The girl fever, too, made me idealize first one five years older than I, 
later another three years older, and still later one of my own age. I 
would have eaten dirt for each of them for a year or two; was ex- 
tremely gallant and the hero of many romances for two, but all the 
time so bashful that I scarcely dared speak to one of them, and no 
schoolmate ever suspected it all. Music also became a craze at 
fourteen. Before, I had hated lessons, now I was thrilled and would 
be a musician, despite my parents' protests. I practised the piano 
furiously ; wrote music and copied stacks of it ; made a list of several 
hundred pieces and tunes, including everything musical I knew; 
would imagine a crowded hall, where I played and swayed with fine 
airs. The vast assembly applauded and would not let me go, but all 
the time it was a simple piece and I was a very ordinary player. At 
fifty years, this is still a relic. I now in hours of fatigue pound the 
piano and dreamily imagine dazed and enchanted audiences. Then 
came oratory, and I glowed and thrilled in declaiming Webster's 
"Reply to Hayne," " Thanatopsis," Byron's "Darkness," Patrick 
Henry, and best of all " The Maniac," which I spouted in a fervid way 
wearing a flaming red necktie. I remember a fervid scene with myself 
on a high solitary hill with a bald summit two miles from home, where 

1 Horace Bushnell, Preacher and Theologian. By Theodore F. 
Hunger. Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1899. 

194 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

I once went because I had been blamed. I tried to sum myself up, 
inventory my good and bad points. It was Sunday, and I was keyed 
up to a frenzy of resolve, prayer, idealization of life; all grew all in a 
jumble. My resolve to go to college was clinched then and there, and 
that hill will always remain my Pisgah and Moriah, Horeb and Sinai 
all in one. I paced back and forth in the wind and shouted, * I will 
make people know and revere me ; I will do something ' ; and called 
everything to witness my vow that I never again would visit this 
spot till all was fulfilled." "Alas! " he says, "I have never been there 
since. Once, to a summer party who went, I made excuse for not 
keeping this rendezvous. It was too sacramental. Certainly it was 
a very deep and never-to-be-forgotten experience there all alone, 
when something of great moment to me certainly took place in my 
soul." 

In the biography of Frederick Douglass ^ we are told that when 
he was about thirteen he began to feel deeply the moral yoke of 
slavery and to seek means of escaping it. He became interested in 
religion, was converted, and dreamed of and prayed for liberty. 
With great ingenuity he extracted knowledge of the alphabet and 
reading from white boys of his acquaintance. At sixteen, under a 
brutal master he revolted and was beaten until he was faint from loss 
of blood, and at seventeen he fought and whipped the brutal over- 
seer Covey, who would have invoked the law, which made death the 
punishment for such an offense, but for shame of having been worsted 
by a negro boy and from the reflection that there was no profit from 
a dead slave. Only at twenty did he escape into the new world of 
freedom. 

Jacob Riis ^ "fell head over heels in love with sweet Elizabeth" 
when he was fifteen and she thirteen. His "courtship proceeded at a 
tumultuous pace, which first made the town laugh, then put it out of 
patience and made some staid matrons express the desire to box my 
ears soundly." She played among the lumber where he worked, and 
he watched her so intently that he scarred his shinbone with an 
adze he should have been minding. He cut off his forefinger with an 
ax when she was dancing on a beam near by, and once fell off a roof 
when craning his neck to see her go round a corner. At another 
time he ordered her father off the dance-floor, because he tried to take 

1 By C. W. Chesnutt. (Beacon Biographies.) Small, Maynard and 
Co., Boston, 1899. 

2 The Making of an American. Macmillan, 1901. 

195 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

his daughter home a few minutes before the appointed hour of mid- 
night. Young as he was, he was large and tried to run away to join 
the army, but finally went to Copenhagen to serve his apprenticeship 
with a builder, and here had an interview with Hans Christian Ander- 
sen. 

Ellery Sedgwick tells us that at thirteen the mind of Thomas 
Paine ran on stories of the sea which his teacher had told him, and 
that he attempted to enlist on the privateer Terrible. He was restless 
at home for years, and shipped on a trading vessel at nineteen. 

Indeed, modern literature in our tongue abounds in this element, 
from ''Childe Harold" to the second and third long chapters in Mrs. 
Ward's " David Grieve," ending with his engagement to Lucy 
Purcell; Thackeray's Arthur Pendennis and his characteristic love of 
the far older and scheming Fanny Fotheringay ; David in James Lane 
Allen's "Reign of Law," who read Darwin, was expelled from the Bible 
College and the church, and finally was engaged to Gabriella; and 
scores more might be enumerated. There is even Sonny, * who, rude 
as he was and poorly as he did in all his studies, at the same age when 
he began to keep company, "tallered" his hair, tied a bow of ribbon 
to the buggy whip, and grew interested in manners, passing things, 
putting on his coat and taking off his hat at table, began to study his 
menagerie of pet snakes, toads, lizards, wrote John Burroughs, helped 
him and got help in return, took to observing, and finally wrote a 
book about the forest and its occupants, all of which is very hien 
trouve if not historic truth. 

Two singular reflections always rearise in reading 
Goethe's autobiographical writings: first, that both the 
age and the place, with its ceremonies, festivals, great 
pomp and stirring events in close quarters in the little 
province where he lived, were especially adapted to 
educate children and absorb them in externals; and, 
second, that this wonderful boy had an extreme propen- 
sity for moralizing and drawing lessons of practical 
service from all about him. This is no less manifest 
in Wilhelm Meister 's Apprenticeship and Travels, which 

» Sonny. By Ruth McEnery Stuart. The Century Co., New York, 
1896. 

196 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

supplements the autobiography. Both together present 
a very unique type of adolescence, the elaborate story 
of which defies epitome. From the puppet craze well 
on into his precocious university life it was his passion 
to explore the widest ranges of experience and then to 
reflect, moralize, or poetize upon them. Perhaps no 
one ever studied the nascent stages of his own life and 
elaborated their every incident with such careful ob- 
servation and analysis. His peculiar diathesis enabled 
him to conserve their freshness on to full maturity, 
when he gave them literary form. Most lack power to 
fully utilize their own experience even for practical self- 
knowledge and guidance, but with Goethe nothing was 
wasted from which self -culture could be extracted. 

Goethe's first impression of female loveliness was of a girl named 
Gretchen, v/ho served wine one evening, and whose face and form fol- 
lowed him for a long time. Their meetings always gave him a thrill 
of pleasure, and though his love was like many first loves, very spirit- 
ual and awakened by goodness and beauty, it gave a new brightness 
to the whole world, and to be near h2r seemed to him an indispensa- 
ble condition of his being. Her fiance was generally with her, and 
Goethe experienced a shock in finding that she had become a milliner's 
assistant, for although, like all natural boys of aristocratic families, 
he loved common people, this interest was not favored by his parents. 
The night following the coronation day several were compelled to 
spend in chairs, and he and his Gretchen, with others, slept, she with 
her head upon his shoulder, until all the others had awakened in the 
morning. At last they parted at her door, and for the first and last 
time they kissed but never met again, although he often wept in 
thinking of her. He was terribly affronted to fully realize that, 
although only two years older than himself, she should have re- 
garded him as a child. He tried to strip her of all loving qualities 
and think her odious, but her image hovered over him. The sanity 
of instinct innate in youth prompted him to lay aside as childish the 
foolish habit of weeping and railing, and his mortification that she 
regarded him somewhat as a nurse might, gradually helped to work 
his cure. 

He was very fond of his own name, and, like young and un- 

197 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

educated people, wrote or carved it anywhere; later placed near it 
that of a new love, Annette, and afterward on finding the tree he shed 
tears, melted toward her, and made an idyl. He was also seized 
with a passion of teasing her and dominating over her devotedness 
with wanton and tyrannical caprice, venting upon her the ill humor 
of his disappointments, and grew absurdly jealous and lost her after 
she had borne with him with incredible patience and after terrible 
scenes with her by which he gained nothing. Frenzied by his loss, 
he began to abuse his physical nature and was only saved from illness 
by the heaUng power of his poetic talent; the " Lover's Caprice" was 
written with the impetus of a boiling passion. In the midst of many 
serious events, a reckless humor, which was due to excess of life, 
developed which made him feel himself superior to the moment, and 
even to court danger. He played tricks, although rarely with pre- 
meditation. Later he mused much upon the transient nature of love 
and the mutability of character; the extent to which the senses could 
be indulged within the bounds of morality; he sought to rid himself 
of all that troubled him by writing song or epigram about it, which 
made him seem frivolous and prompted one friend to seek to subdue 
him by means of church forms, which he had severed on coming to 
Leipzig. By degrees he felt an epoch approaching when all respect 
for authority was to vanish, and he became suspicious and even 
despairing with regard to the best individuals he had known before 
and grew chummy with a young tutor whose jokes and fooleries were 
incessant. His disposition fluctuated between gaiety and melancholy, 
and Rousseau attracted him. Meanwhile his health declined until a 
long illness, which began with a hemorrhage, caused him to oscillate 
for days between life and death; and convalescence, generally so de- 
lightful, was marred by a serious tumor. His father's disposition 
was stern, and he could become passionate and bitter, and his mother's 
domesticity made her turn to religion, so that on coming home he 
formed the acquaintance of a religious circle. Again Goethe was 
told by a hostile child that he was not the true son of his father. 
This inoculated him with a disease that long lurked in his system and 
prompted various indirect investigations to get at the truth, during 
which he compared all distinguished guests with his own physiog- 
nomy to detect his own likeness. 

Up to the Leipzig period he had great joy in wandering unknown, 
unconscious of self ; but he soon began to torment himself with an al- 
most hypertrophied fancy that he was attracting much attention, 
that others' eyes were turned on his person to fix it in their memories, 
that he was scanned and found fault with; and hence he developed a 
love of the country, of the woods and solitary places, where he could 

198 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

be hedged in and separated from all the world. Here he began to 
throw off his former habit of looking at things from the art stand- 
point and to take pleasure in natural objects for their own sake. 
His mother had almost grown up to consciousness in her two oldest 
children, and his first disappointment in love turned his thought all 
the more affectionately toward her and his sister, a year younger. 
He was long consumed with amazement over the newly awakening 
sense impulse that took intellectual forms and the mental needs that 
clothed themselves in sense images. He fell to building air castles of 
opposition lecture courses and gave himself up to many dreams of 
ideal university conditions. He first attended lectures diligently, 
but suffered much harm from being too advanced; learned a great 
deal that he could not regulate, and was thereby made uncomfortable ; 
grew interested in the fit of his clothes, of which hitherto he had 
been careless. He was in despair at the uncertainty of his own taste 
and judgment, and almost feared he must make a complete change 
of mind, renouncing what he had hitherto learned, and so one day 
in great contempt for his past burned up his poetry, sketches, etc. 
He had learned to value and love the Bible, and owed his moral 
culture to it. Its events and symbols were deeply stamped upon 
him, so without being a pietist he was greatly moved at the scoffing 
spirit toward it which he met at the university. From youth he 
had stood on good terms with God, and at times he had felt that he 
had some things to forgive God for not having given better assist- 
ance to his infinite good-will. Under all this influence he turned to 
cabalism and became interested in crystals and the microcosm and 
macrocosm, and fell into the habit of despair over what he had 
been and believed just before. He conceived a kind of hermetical 
or neoplatonic godhead creating in more and more eccentric circles, 
until the last, which rose in contradiction, was Lucifer to whom 
creation was committed. He first of all imagined in detail an 
angelic host, and finally a whole theology was wrought out in petto. 
He used a gilt ornamented music-stand as a kind of altar with 
fumigating pastils for incense, where each morning God was ap- 
proached by offerings until one day a conflagration put a sudden 
end to these celebrations. 

Hans Andersen,^ the son of a poor shoemaker, taught in a charity 
school at the dawn of puberty; vividly animated Bible stories from 
pictures painted on the wall; was dreamy and absent-minded; told 

1 The Story of My Life. Works, vol. 8 new edition. Houghton, Mifflin 
and Co., Boston, 1894. 

14 199 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

continued stories to his mates; at confirmation vowed he would be 
famous; and finally, at fourteen, left home for Copenhagen, where he 
was violently stage-struck and worked his way from friendship with 
the bill-poster to the stage as page, shepherd, etc. ; called on a famous 
dancer, who scorned him, and then, feeling that he had no one but 
God to depend on, prayed earnestly and often. For nearly a year, 
until his voice broke, he was a fine singer. He wet with his tears the 
eyes of a portrait of a heartless man that he might feel for him. 
He played with a puppet theater and took a childish delight in deck- 
ing the characters with gay remnants that he begged from shops; 
wrote several plays which no one would accept; stole into an empty 
theater one New Year's day to pray aloud on the middle of the stage; 
shouted with joy; hugged and kissed a beech-tree till people thought 
him insane; abhorred the thought of apprenticeship to Latin as he 
did to that of a trade, which was a constant danger; and was one of 
the most dreamy and sentimental, and by spells religious and prayer- 
ful, of youth. 

George Ebers ^ remembered as a boy of eleven the revolution of 
'48 in Berlin, soon after which he was placed in Froebel's school at 
Keilhau. This great teacher with his noble associates, Middendorf, 
Barop, and Langekhal, lived with the boys; told the stirring stories 
of their own lives as soldiers in the war of liberation ; led their pupils 
on long excursions in vacation, often lasting for months, and gave 
much liberty to the boys, who were allowed to haze not only their 
new mates, but new teachers. This transfer from the city to the 
country roused a veritable passion in the boy, who remained here till 
he was fifteen. Trees and cliffs were climbed, collections made, the 
Saale by moonlight and the lofty Steiger at sunset were explored. 
There were swimming and skating and games, and the maxim of the 
school, " Friede, Freude, Freiheit," ^ was lived up to. The boys hung 
on their teachers for stories. The teachers took their boys into their 
confidence for all their own literary aims, loves, and ideals. One had 
seen the corpse of Korner and another knew Prohaska. "The 
Roman postulate that knowledge should be imparted to boys ac- 
cording to a thoroughly tested method approved by the mature 
human intellect and which seems most useful to it for later life" was 
the old system of sacrificing the interests of the child for those of the 
man. Here childhood was to live itself out completely and naturally 

1 The Story of My Life. Translated by M. J. Safford. D. Appleton 
and Co., New York, 1893. 



2 Peace, joy, freedom. 



200 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

into an ever-renewed paradise. The temperaments, dispositions, 
and characters of each of the sixty boys were carefully studied and 
recorded. Some of these are still little masterpieces of psychological 
penetration, and this was made the basis of development. The ex- 
treme Teutonism cultivated by wrestling, shooting, and fencing, 
giving each a spot of land to sow, reap, and shovel, and all in an 
atmosphere of adult life, made an environment that fitted the transi- 
tion period as well as any that the history of education affords. 
Every tramp and battle were described in a book by each boy. When 
at fifteen Ebers was transferred to the Kottbus Gymnasium, he felt 
like a colt led from green pastures to the stable, and the period of 
effervescence made him almost possessed by a demon, so many sorts 
of follies did he commit. He wrote "a, poem of the world," fell in 
love with an actress older than himself, became known as foolhardy 
for his wild escapades, and only slowly sobered down. 

In Gottfried Keller's " Der griine Heinrich," ^ the author, whom 
R. M. Meyer calls " the most eminent literary German of the nineteenth 
century," reviews the memories of his early life. This autobiography 
is a plain and very realistic story of a normal child, and not adulter- 
ated with fiction like Goethe's or with psychoses like Rousseau or 
Bashkirtseff. He seems a boy like all other boys, and his childhood 
and youth were in no wise extraordinary. The first part of this work, 
which describes his youth up to the age of eighteen, is the most im- 
portant, and everything is given with remarkable fidelity and minute- 
ness. It is a tale of little things. All the friendships and loves and 
impulses are there, and he is fundamentally selfish and utilitarian; 
God and nature were one, and only when his beloved Anna died did 
he wish to believe in immortality. He, too, as a child, found two 
kinds of love in his heart — the ideal and the sensual, very independent 
— the one for a young and innocent girl and the other for a superb 
young woman years older than he, pure, although the personification 
of sense. He gives a rich harvest of minute and sagacious observa- 
tions about his strange simultaneous loves; the peculiar tastes of food; 
his day-dream period; and his rather prolonged habit of lying, the 
latter because he had no other vent for invention. He describes with 
great regret his leaving school at so early an age ; his volcanic passion 
of anger ; his self-distrust ; his periods of abandon ; his passion to make 
a success of art though he did not of life; his spells of self-despair and 
cynicism; his periods of desolation in his single life; his habit of story- 



1 Gesammelte Werke. Vierter Band. Wilhehn Hertz, Berlin, 1897. 

201 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

telling; his wrestling with the problem of theology and God; the con- 
flict between his philosophy and his love of the girls, etc. 

From a private school in Leipzig, where he had shown all a boy's 
tact in finding what his masters thought the value of each subject they 
taught; where he had joined in the vandalism of using a battering- 
ram to break a way to the hated science apparatus and to destroy it ; 
feeling that the classical writers were overpraised; and where at the 
age of sixteen he had appeared several times in public as a reciter of 
his own poems. Max Miiller returned to Leipzig and entered upon the 
freedom of university life there at the age of seventeen. For years 
his chief enjoyment was music. 1 He played the piano well, heard 
everything he could in concert or opera, was an oratorio tenor, and 
grew more and more absorbed in music, so that he planned to devote 
himself altogether to it and also to enter a musical school at Dessau, 
but nothing came of it. At the university he saw little of society, 
was once incarcerated for wearing a club ribbon, and confesses that 
with his boon companions he was guilty of practises which would 
now bring culprits into collision with authorities. He fought three 
duels, participated in many pranks and freakish escapades, but never- 
theless attended fifty-three different courses of lectures in three years. 
When Hegelism was the state philosophy, he tried hard to under- 
stand it, but dismissed it with the sentiments expressed by a French 
officer to his tailor, who refused to take the trousers he had ordered 
to be made very tight because they did not fit so closely that he could 
not get into them. Darwin attracted him, yet the wildness of his 
followers repelled. He says, "I confess I felt quite bewildered for a 
time and began to despair altogether of my reasoning powers." He 
wonders how young minds in German universities survive the storms 
and fogs through which they pass. With bated breath he heard his 
elders talk of philosophy and tried to lay hold of a word here and 
there, but it all floated before his mind like mist. Later he had an 
Hegelian period, but found in Herbart a corrective, and at last 
decided upon Sanskrit and other ancient languages, because he felt 
that he must know something that no other knew, and also that the 
Germans had then heard only the after-chime and not the real 
striking of the bells of Indian philosophy. From twenty his struggles 
and his queries grew more definite, and at last, at the age of twenty- 
two, he was fully launched upon his career in Paris, and later went to 
Oxford. 

* My Autobiography, p. 106. Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York, 
1901. 

202 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

At thirteen Wagner^ translated about half the "Odyssey" vol- 
untarily; at fourteen began the tragedy which was to combine the 
grandeur of two of Shakespeare's dramas; at sixteen he tried "his 
new-fledged musical wings by soaring at once to the highest peaks of 
orchestral achievement without wasting any time on the humble 
foot-hills." He sought to make a new departure, and, compared to 
the grandeur of his own composition, " Beethoven's Ninth Symphony 
appeared like a simple Pleyel Sonata." To facilitate the reading of 
his astounding score, he wrote it in three kinds of ink — red for strings, 
green for the wood-wind, and black for the brass instruments. He 
writes that this overture was the climax of his absurdities, and 
although the audience before which an accommodating orchestra 
played it were disgusted and the musicians were convulsed with 
laughter, it made a deep impression upon the author's mind. Even 
after matriculating at the university he abandoned himself so long to 
the dissipations common to student life before the reaction came that 
his relatives feared that he was a good-for-nothing. 

In his " Hannele," Hauptmann, the dramatist, describes in a kind 
of dream poem what he supposed to pass through the mind of a dying 
girl of thirteen or fourteen, who does not wish to live and is so ab- 
sorbed by the " Brownies of her brain " that she hardly knows whether 
she is alive on earth or dead in heaven, and who sees the Lord Jesus in 
the form of the schoolmaster whom she adores. In her closing vision 
there is a symbolic representation of her owm resurrection. To the 
passionate discussions in Germany, England, and France, as to 
whether this character is true to adolescence, we can only answer 
with an emphatic affirmative; that her heaven abounds in local 
color and in fairy-tale items, that it is very material, and that she is 
troubled by fears of sin against the Holy Ghost, is answer enough in 
an ill-used, starving child with a fevered brain, whose dead mother 
taught her these things. 

Saint-Pierre's " Paul and Virginia " is an attempt 
to describe budding adolescence in a boy and girl born 
on a remote island and reared in a state of natural sim- 
plicity. The descriptions are sentimental after the fash- 
ion of the age in France, and the pathos, which to us 
smacks of affectation and artificiality, nevertheless has 
a vein of truth in it. The story really begins when the 

1 Wagner and His Works. By Henry T. Finck. Chas. Scribner's 
Sons, New York, 1893. 

203 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

two children were twelve; and the description of the 
dawn of love and melancholy in Virginia's heart, for 
some time concealed from Paul, of her disquiet and 
piety, of the final frank avowal of eternal love by each, 
set off by the pathetic separation, and of the undying 
love, and finally the tragic death and burial of each — 
all this owes its charm, for its many generations of 
readers, to its merits as an essentially true picture of 
the human heart at this critical age. This work and 
Eousseau ^ have contributed to give French literature 
its peculiar cast in its description of this age. 

" The first explosions of a combustible constitution" in Rous- 
seau's precocious nature were troublesome, and he felt premature 
sensations of erotic voluptuousness, but without any sin. He longed 
"to fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates or 
implore pardon." He only wanted a lady, to become a knight errant. 
At ten he was passionately devoted to a Mile. Vulson, whom he 
publicly and tyrannically claimed as his own and would allow no 
other to approach. He had very different sensuous feelings toward 
Mile. Goton, with whom his relations were very passionate, though 
pure. Absolutely under the power of both these mistresses, the 
effects they produced upon him were in no wise related to each other. 
The former was a brother's affection with the jealousy of a lover 
added, but the latter a furious, tigerish, Turkish rage. When told 
of the former's marriage, in his indignation and heroic fury he swore 
never more to see a perfidious girl. A slightly neurotic vein of pro- 
longed ephebeitis pervades much of his life. 

Pierre Loti's " Story of a Child "^ was written when the author was 
forty-two, and contains hardly a fact, but it is one of the best of inner 
autobiographies, and is nowhere richer than in the last chapters, which 
bring the author do^\Ti to the age of fourteen and a half. He vividly 
describes the new joy at waking, which he began to feel at twelve or 
thirteen; the clear vision into the bottomless pit of death; the new, 
marvelous susceptibility to nature as comradeship with boys of his 

1 Les Confessions. CEuvres Completes, vols. 8 and 9. Hachette et 
Cie., Paris, 1903. 

2 Translated from the French b}- C. F. Smith. C. C. Birchard and Co., 
Boston, 1901. 

204 



BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 

ovm age was lacking; the sudden desires from pure bravado and 
perversity to do something unseemly, e. g., making a fly omelet and 
carrying it in a procession with song ; the melting of pewter plates and 
pouring them into water and salting a wild tract of land with them; 
organizing a band of miners, whom he led as if with keen scent to the 
right spot and rediscovered his nuggets, everything being done 
mysteriously and as a tribal secret. Loti had a new feeling for the 
haunting music of Chopin, which he had been taught to play but had 
not been interested in; his mind was inflamed, by a home visit of an 
elder brother, with the idea of going to the South Sea Islands, and 
this became a long obsession which finally led him to enlist in the 
navy, dropping, with a beating heart, the momentous letter into the 
post-ofRce after long misgivings and delays. He had a superficial 
and a hidden self, the latter somewhat whimsical and perhaps ridic- 
ulous, shared only with a few intimate friends for whom he would 
have let himself be cut into bits. He believes his transition period 
lasted longer than with the majority of men, and during it he was 
carried from one extreme to another; had rather eccentric and 
absurd manners, and touched most of the perilous rocks on the 
voyage of life. He had an early love for an older girl whose name he 
wrote in cipher on his books, although he felt it a little artificial, but 
believed it might have developed into a great and true hereditary- 
friendship, continuing that which their ancestors had felt for many 
generations. The birth of love in his heart was in a dream after 
having read the forbidden poet, Alfred de Musset. He was fourteen, 
and in his dream it was a soft, odorous twilight. He walked amid 
flowers seeking a nameless some one whom he ardently desired, and 
felt that something strange and wonderful, intoxicating as it ad- 
vanced, was going to happen. The twilight grew deeper, and behind 
a rose-bush he saw a young girl with a languorous and mysterious 
smile, although her forehead and eyes were hidden. As it darkened 
rather suddenly, her eyes came out, and they were very personal and 
seemed to belong to some one already much beloved, who had been 
found with '' transports of infinite joy and tenderness." He woke 
with a start and sought to retain the phantom, which faded. He 
could not conceive that she was a mere illusion, and as he realized 
that she had vanished he felt overwhelmed with hopelessness. It 
was the first stirring "of true love with all its great melancholy and 
deep mystery, with its overwhelming but sad enchantment — love 
which Uke a perfume endows with a fragrance all it touches." 

It is, I believe, high time that ephebic literature 
should be recognized as a class by itself, and have a 

205 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

place of its own in the history of letters and in criti- 
cism. Much of it should be individually prescribed for 
the reading of the young, for whom it has a singular zest 
and is a true stimulus and corrective. This stage of life 
now has what might almost be called a school of its 
own. Here the young appeal to and listen to each other 
as they do not to adults, and in a way the latter have 
failed to appreciate. Again, no biography, and espe- 
cially no autobiography, should henceforth be com- 
plete if it does not describe this period of transforma- 
tion so all-determining for future life to which it alone 
can often give the key. Rightly to draw the lessons 
of this age not only saves us from waste ineffable of 
this rich but crude area of experience, but makes matu- 
rity saner and more complete. Lastly, many if not 
most young people should be encouraged to enough of 
the confessional private journalism to teach them self- 
knowledge, for the art of self-expression usually begins 
now if ever, when it has a wealth of subjective material 
and needs forms of expression peculiar to itself. 

For additional references on the subject of this 
chapter, see: 

Alcafarado, Marianna, Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Trans- 
lated by R. H., New York, 1887. Richardson, Abby Sage, Abelard 
and Heloise, and Letters of Heloise, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Bos- 
ton. Smith, Theodote L., Types of Adolescent Affection. Peda- 
gogical Seminary, June, 1904, vol. 11, pp. 178-203. 



206 



CHAPTER IX 

THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS 

Change from childish to adult friends — Influence of favorite teachers — 
What children wish or plan to do or be — Property and the money 
sense — Social judgments — The only child — First social organizations 
— Student life — Associations for youth, controlled by adults. 

In a few aspects we are already able to trace the 
normal psychic outgrowing of the home of childhood as 
its interests irradiate into an ever enlarging environ- 
ment. Almost the only duty of small children is 
habitual and prompt obedience. Our very presence 
enforces one general law — that of keeping our good- 
will and avoiding our displeasure. They respect all we 
smile at or even notice, and grow to it like the plant 
toward the light. Their early lies are often saying what 
they think will please. At bottom, the most restless child 
admires and loves those who save him from too great 
fluctuations by coercion, provided the means be rightly 
chosen and the ascendency extend over heart and mind. 
But the time comes when parents are often shocked at 
the lack of respect suddenly shown by the child. They 
have ceased to be the highest ideals. The period of 
habituating morality and making it habitual is ceasing; 
and the passion to realize freedom, to act on personal 
experience, and to keep a private conscience is in order. 
To act occasionally with independence from the highest 
possible ideal motives develops the impulse and the joy 
of pure obligation, and thus brings some new and origi- 

207 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

nal force into the world and makes habitual guidance 
by the highest and best, or by inner as opposed to outer 
constraint, the practical rule of life. To bring the 
richest streams of thought to bear in interpreting the 
ethical instincts, so that the youth shall cease to live 
in a moral interregnum, is the real goal of self-knowl- 
edge. This is true education of the will and prepares 
the way for love of overcoming obstacles of difficulty, 
perhaps even of conflict. This impulse is often the 
secret of obstinacy.^ And yet, " at no time in life will 
a human being respond so heartily if treated by older 
and wiser people as if he were an equal or even a su- 
perior. The attempt to treat a child at adolescence as 
you would treat an inferior is instantly fatal to good 
discipline. ' ' ^ Parents still think of their offspring as 
mere children, and tighten the rein when they should 
loosen it. Many young people feel that they have the 
best of homes and yet that they will go crazy if they 
must remain in them. If the training of earlier years 
has been good, guidance by command may now safely 
give way to that by ideals, which are sure to be heroic. 
The one unpardonable thing for the adolescent is dul- 
ness, stupidity, lack of life, interest, and enthusiasm 
in school or teachers, and, perhaps above all, too great 
stringency. Least of all, at this stage, can the curriculum 
or school be an ossuary. The child must now be taken 
into the family councils and find the parents interested 
in all that interests him. Where this is not done, we 
have the conditions for the interesting cases of so many 
youth, who now begin to suspect that father, mother, or 
both, are not their true parents. Not only is there in- 

1 Tarde: L'Opposition Universelle. Alcan, Paris, 1897, p. 461. 

2 The Adolescent at Home and in School. By E. G. Lancaster. 
Proceedings of the National Educational Association, 1899, p. 1039. 

208 



THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS 

terest in rapidly widening associations with coevals, 
but a new lust to push on and up to maturity. One 
marked trait now is to seek friends and companions 
older than themselves, or, next to this, to seek those 
younger. This is in marked contrast with previous 
years, when they seek associates of their own age. Pos- 
sibly the merciless teasing instinct, which culminates 
at about the same time, may have some influence, but 
certain it is that now interest is transpolarized up and 
down the age scale. One reason is the new hunger for 
information, not only concerning reproduction, but a 
vast variety of other matters, so that there is often an 
attitude of silent begging for knowledge. In answer 
to Lancaster's^ questions on this subject, some sought 
older associates because they could learn more from 
them, found them better or more steadfast friends, 
craved sympathy and found most of it from older and 
perhaps married people. Some were more interested in 
their parents' conversation w^ith other adults than with 
themselves, and were particularly entertained by the 
chance of hearing things they had no business to. There 
is often a feeling that adults do not realize this new 
need of friendship with them and show want of sym- 
pathy almost brutal. 

Stableton,^ who has made interesting notes on individual boys 
entering the adolescent period, emphasizes the importance of 
sympathy, appreciation, and respect in dealing with this age. They 
must now be talked to as equals, and in this way their habits of 
industry and even their dangerous love affairs can be controlled. 



1 The Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence. Pedagogical Semi- 
nary, July, 1897, vol. 5, p. 87. 

2 Study of Boys Entering the Adolescent Period of Life. North 
Western Monthly, November, 1897, vol. 8, pp. 248-250, and a series 
thereafter. 

209 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

He says, "There is no more important question before the teaching 
fraternity to-day than how to deal justly and successfully with boys 
at this time of life. This is the age when they drop out of school " in 
far too large numbers, and he thinks that the small percentage of 
male graduates from our high schools is due to "the inability of the 
average grammar grade or high-school teacher to deal rightly with 
boys in this critical period of their school life." Most teachers 
"know all their bad points, but fail to discover their good ones." 
The fine disciplinarian, the mechanical movement of whose school is 
so admirable and who does not realize the new need of liberty or how 
loose-jointed, mentally and physically, all are at this age, should be 
supplanted by one who can look into the heart and by a glance make 
the boy feel that he or she is his friend. "The weakest work in our 
schools is the handling of boys entering the adolescent period of life, 
and there is no greater blessing that can come to a boy at this age, 
when he does not understand himself, than a good strong teacher 
that understands him, has faith in him, and will day by day lead him 
till he can walk alone." 

Small ^ found the teacher a focus of imitation whence many in- 
fluences, both physical and mental, irradiated to the pupils. Every 
accent, gesture, automatism, like and dislike is caught consciously 
and unconsciously. Every intellectual interest in the teacher 
permeates the class — liars, if trusted, become honest; those treated as 
ladies and gentlemen act so; those told by favorite teachers of the 
good things they are capable of feel a strong impulsion to do them; 
some older children are almost transformed by being made com- 
panions to teachers, by having their good traits recognized, and by 
frank apologies by the teacher when in error. 

An interesting and unsuspected illustration of the growth of in- 
dependence with adolescence was found in 2,411 papers from the 
second to eighth grades on the characteristics of the best teacher as 
seen by children.^ In the second and third grades, all, and in ^e 
fourth, ninety-five per cent specified help in studies. This falls off 
rapidly in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades to thirty-nine per 
cent, while at the same time the quality of patience in the upper 
grades rises from a mention by two to twenty-two per cent. 

1 The Suggestibility of Children, Pedagogical Seminary, December, 
1896, vol. 4, p. 211. 

2 Characteristics of the Best Teacher as Recognized by Children. By 
H. E. Kratz. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1896, vol. 3, pp. 413-418. 
See also The High School Teacher from the Pupil's Point of View,'TDy 
W. F. Book. Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1905, vol. 12, pp. 239-288. 

- 210 



THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS 

Sanford BelP collated the answers of 543 males and 488 females 
as to who of all their past teachers did them most good, and 
wherein; whom they loved and disliked most, and why. His 
most striking result is presented in a curve which shows that 
fourteen in girls and sixteen in boys is the age in which most good 
was felt to have been done, and that curves culminating at twelve 
for both sexes but not falling rapidly until fifteen or sixteen re- 
present the period when the strongest and most indelible dislikes 
were felt. What seems to be most appreciated in teachers is the 
giving of purpose, arousing of ideals, kindling of ambition to be 
something or do something and so giving an object in hfe, encour- 
agement to overcome circumstances, and, in general, inspiring self- 
confidence and giving direction. Next come personal sympathy 
and interest, kindness, confidence, a little praise, being understood; 
and next, special help in lessons, or timely and kindly advice, while 
stability and poise of character, purity, the absence of hypocrisy, 
independence, personal beauty, athleticism and vigor are prominent. 
It is singular that those of each sex have been most helped by their 
own sex and that this prominence is far greatest in men. Four- 
fifths of the men and nearly one-half of the women, however, got 
most help from men. Male teachers, especially near adolescence, 
seem most helpful for both sexes. 

The qualities that inspire most dislike are malevolence, sarcasm, 
unjust punishment, suspicion, severity, sternness, absence of laugh- 
ing and smiling, indifference, threats and broken vows, excessive 
scolding and "roasting," and fondness for inflicting blows. The 
teacher who does not smile is far more liable to excite animosity. 
Most boys dislike men most, and girls' dislikes are about divided. 
The stories of school cruelties and indignities are painful. Often 
inveterate grudges are established by little causes, and it is singular 
how permanent and indelible strong dislikes are for the majority of 
children. In many cases, aversions engendered before ten have 
lasted with little diminution till maturity, and there is a sad record 
of children who have lost a term, a year, or dropped school altogether 
because of ill treatment or partiality. 

Nearly two thousand children were asked what they would do in a 
specific case of conflict between teacher and parents. It was found 
that, while for young children parental authority was preferred, a 
marked decline began about eleven and was most rapid after fourteen 
in girls and fifteen in boys, and that there was a nearly corresponding 

1 A Study of the Teacher's Influence. Pedagogical Seminary, Decem- 
ber, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 492-525. 

211 • 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

increase in the number of pubescents who preferred the teacher's au- 
thority. The reasons for their choice were also analyzed, and it was 
found that whereas for the young, unconditioned authority was gen- 
erally satisfactory, with pubescents, abstract authority came into 
marked predominance, "until when the children have reached the 
age of sixteen almost seventy-five per cent of their reasons belong to 
this class, and the children show themselves able to extend the idea 
of authority without violence to their sense of justice." 

On a basis of 1,400 papers answering the question 
whom, of anyone ever heard or read of, they would like to 
resemble, Barnes ^ found that girls ' ideals were far more 
often found in the immediate circle of their acquaint- 
ance than boys, and that those within that circle were 
more often in their own family, but that the tend- 
ency to go outside their personal knowledge and choose 
historical and public characters was greatly augmented 
at puberty, when also the heroes of philanthropy showed 
marked gain in prominence. Boys rarely chose women 
as their ideals; but in America, half the girls at eight 
and two-thirds at eighteen chose male characters. The 
range of important women 'ideals among the girls was 
surprisingly small. Barnes fears that if from the choice 
of relatives as ideals, the expansion to remote or world 
heroes is too fast, it may " lead to disintegration of 
character and reckless living. " ' ' If , on the other hand, 
it is expanded too slowly we shall have that arrested de- 
velopment which makes good ground in which to grow 
stupidity, brutality, and drunkenness — the first fruits of 
a sluggish and self-contained mind." " No one can 
consider the regularity with which local ideals die out 
and are replaced by world ideals without feeling that 
he is in the presence of law-abiding forces," and this 

1 Children's Ideals. Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 
3-12. 

212 



THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS 

emphasizes the fact that the teacher or parent does not 
work in a world governed by caprice. 

The compositions written by thousands of children 
in New York on what they wanted to do when they 
were grown np were collated by Dr. Thurber.^ The 
replies were serious, and showed that poor children 
looked forward willingly to severe labor and the in- 
creased earnestness of adolescent years, and the better 
answers to the question why were noteworthy. All 
anticipated giving up the elastic joyousness of child- 
hood and felt the need of patience. Up to ten, there 
was an increase in the number of those who had two 
or more desires. This number declined rapidly at 
eleven, rose as rapidly at twelve, and slowly fell later. 
Preferences for a teacher's life exceeded in girls up to 
nine, fell rapidly at eleven, increased slightly the next 
year, and declined thereafter. The ideal of becoming 
a dressmaker and milliner increased till ten, fell at 
eleven, rose rapidly to a maximum at thirteen, when 
it eclipsed teaching, and then fell permanently again. 
The professions of clerk and stenographer showed a 
marked rise from eleven and a half. The number of 
boys who chose the father's occupation attained its 
maximum at nine and its minimum at twelve, with a 
slight rise to fourteen, when the survey ended. The 
ideal of tradesman culminated at eight, with a second 
rise at thirteen. The reason " to earn money " reached 
its high maximum of fifty per cent at twelve, and fell 
very rapidly. The reason " because I like it " culmi- 
nated at ten and fell steadily thereafter. The motive that 
influenced the choice of a profession and which was 
altruistic toward parents or for their benefit culminated 

1 Transactions of the Illinois Society for Child Study, vol. 2, No. 2, 
1896, pp. 41-46. 

213 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

at twelve and a half, and then declined. The desire for 
character increased somewhat throughout, but rapidly 
after twelve, and the impulse to do good to the world, 
which had risen slowly from nine, mounted sharply after 
thirteen. Thus, " at eleven all the ideas and tendencies 
are increasing toward a maximum. At twelve we find 
the altruistic desires for the welfare of parents, the 
reason ' to earn money '; at thirteen the desire on the 
part of the girls to be dressmakers, also to be clerks and 
stenographers. At fourteen culminates the desire for 
a business career in bank or office among the boys, the 
consciousness of life's uncertainties which appeared 
first at twelve, the desire for character, and the hope of 
doing the world good." 

'' What would you like to be in an imaginary new 
city? " was a question answered by 1,234 written 
papers.^ One hundred and fourteen different occupa- 
tions were given; that of teacher led with the girls at 
every age except thirteen and fourteen, when dress- 
maker and milliner took precedence. The motive of 
making money led among the boys at every age except 
fourteen and sixteen, when occupations chosen because 
they were liked led. The greatest number of those who 
chose the parent's occupation was found at thirteen, but 
from that age it steadily declined and independent 
choice came into prominence. The maximum of girls 
who chose parental vocations w^as at fourteen. Motives 
of philanthropy reached nearly their highest point in 
girls and boys at thirteen. 

Jegi ^ obtained letters addressed to real or imaginary 

1 Children's Ambitions. By H. M. Willard. Barnes's Studies in 
Education, vol. 2, pp. 243-258. (Privately printed by Earl Barnes, 
4401 Sansom Street, Philadelphia.) 

2 Transactions of the Illinois Society for Child Study, October, 1898, 
vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 131-144. 

214 



THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS 

friends from 3,000 German children in Milwaukee, asking 
what they desired to do when they grew up, and why, 
and tabulated returns from 200 boys and 200 girls for 
each age from eight to fourteen inclusive. He also 
found a steadily decreasing influence of relatives to 
thirteen; in early adolescence, the personal motive of 
choosing an occupation because it was liked increased, 
while from twelve in boys and thirteen in girls the con- 
sideration of finding easy vocations grew rapidly strong. 
L. W. Kline ^ studied by the census method returns 
from 2,594 children, who were asked what they wished 
to be and do. He found that in naming both ideals 
and occupations girls were more conservative than boys, 
but more likely to give a reason for their choice. In 
this respect country children resembled boys more than 
city children. Country boys were more prone to in- 
attention, were more independent and able to care for 
themselves, suggesting that the home life of the country 
child is more effective in shaping ideals and character 
than that of the city child. Industrial occupations are 
preferred by the younger children, the professional and 
technical pursuits increasing with age. Judgments of 
rights and justice wdth the young are more prone to 
issue from emotional rather than from intellectual proc- 
esses. Country children seem more altruistic than those 
in the city, and while girls are more sympathetic than 
boys, they are also more easily prejudiced. Many of 
these returns bear unmistakable marks that in some 
homes and schools moralization has been excessive arid 
has produced a sentimental type of morality and often 
a feverish desire to express ethical views instead of 
trusting to suggestion. Children are very prone to have 

1 A Study in Juvenile Ethics. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1903, 
vol. 10, pp. 239-266. 

15 215 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

one code of ideals for themselves and another for others. 
Boys, too, are more original than girls, and country 
children more than city children. 

Friedrich ^ asked German school children what person 
they chose as their pattern. The result showed differ- 
ences of age, sex, and creed. First of all came characters 
in history, which seemed to show that this study for chil- 
dren of the sixth and seventh grades was essentially eth- 
ical or a training of mood and disposition {Gesinniingsun- 
terricht) , and this writer suggests reform in this respect. 
He seems to think that the chief purpose of history for 
this age should be ethical. Next came the influence of 
the Bible, although it was plain that this was rather in 
spite of the catechism and the method of memoriter work. 
Here, too, the immediate environment at this age fur- 
nished few ideals (four and one-fifth per cent), for 
children seem to have keener eyes for the faults than for 
the virtues of those near them. Religion, therefore, should 
chiefly be directed to the emotions and not to the under- 
standing. This census also suggested more care that the 
reading of children should contain good examples in their 
environment, and also that the matter of instruction 
should be more fully adapted to the conditions of sex. 

Friedrich found as his chief age result that children 
of the seventh or older class in the German schools laid 
distinctly greater stress upon characters distinguished by 
bravery and courage than did the children of the sixth 
grade, while the latter more frequently selected characters 
illustrating piety and holiness. The author divided his 
characters into thirty-five classes, illustrating qualities, 
and found that national activity led, with piety a close 
second ; that then came in order those illustrating firmness 

1 Die Ideale der Kinder. Zeitschrift fiir padagogische Psychologie, 
Pathologie und Hygiene. Jahrgang 3, Heft 1, pp. 38-64. 

216 



THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS 

of faith, bravery, modesty, and chastity; then pity and 
sympathy, industry, goodness, patience, etc. 

Taylor, Young, Hamilton, Chambers, and others, have 
also collected interesting data on what children and 
young people hope to be, do, whom they would like to be, 
or resemble, etc. Only a few at adolescence feel them- 
selves so good or happy that they are content to be them- 
selves. Most show more or less discontent at their lot. 
From six to eleven or twelve, the number who find their 
ideals among their acquaintances falls off rapidly, and 
historical characters rise to a maximum at or before the 
earliest teens. From eleven or twelve on into the middle 
teens contemporary ideals increase steadily. London 
children are more backward in this expansion of ideals 
than Americans, while girls choose more acquaintance 
ideals at all ages than do boys. The expansion, these 
authors also trace largely to the study of history. The 
George Washington ideal, which leads all the rest by far 
and is greatly overworked, in contrast with the many 
heroes of equal rank found in England, pales soon, as 
imperfections are seen, and those now making history 
loom up. This is the normal age to free from bondage 
to the immediate present, and this freedom is one meas- 
ure of education. Bible heroes are chosen as ideals by 
only a very small percentage, mostly girls, far more 
characters being from fiction and mythology; where 
Jesus is chosen, His human is preferred to His divine 
side. Again, it would seem that teachers would be ideals, 
especially as many girls intend to teach, but they are 
generally unpopular as choices. In an ideal system they 
would be the first step in expansion from home ideals. 
Military heroes and inventors play leading roles in the 
choices of pubescent boys. 

Girls at all school ages and increasingly up the grades 
217 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

prefer foreign ideals, to be tlie wife of a man of title, as 
aristocracies offer special opportunities for woman to 
shine, and life near the source of fashion is very attract- 
ive, at least up to sixteen. The saddest fact in these 
studies is that nearly half our American pubescent girls, 
or nearly three times as many as in England, choose male 
ideals, or would be men. Girls, too, have from six to 
fifteen times as many ideals as boys. In this significant 
fact we realize how modern woman has cut loose from all 
old moorings and is drifting with no destination and no 
anchor aboard. While her sex has multiplied in all 
lower and high school grades, its ideals are still too mas- 
culine. Text-books teach little about women. When a 
woman's Bible, history, course of study, etc., is proposed, 
her sex fears it may reduce her to the old servitude. 
While boys rarely, and then only when very young, 
choose female ideals, girls' preference for the life of the 
other sex sometimes reaches sixty and seventy per cent. 
The divorce between the life preferred and that de- 
manded by the interests of the race is often absolute. 
Saddest and most unnatural of all is the fact that this 
state of things increases most rapidly during just those 
years when ideals of womanhood should be developed and 
become most dominant, till it seems as if the female 
character was threatened with disintegration. While 
statistics are not yet sufficient to be reliable on the sub- 
ject, there is some indication that woman later slowly 
reverts toward ideals not only from her own sex but also 
from the circle of her own acquaintances. 

The reasons for the choice of ideals are various and 
not yet well determined. Civic virtues certainly rise; 
material and utilitarian considerations do not seem to 
much, if at all, at adolescence, and in some data decline. 
Position, fame, honor, and general greatness increase 

218 



THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS 

rapidly, but moral qualities rise highest and also fastest 
just before and near puberty and continue to increase 
later yet. By these choices both sexes, but girls far most, 
show increasing admiration of ethical and social qualities. 
Artistic and intellectual traits also rise quite steadily 
from ten or eleven onward, but with no such rapidity, 
and reach no such height as military ability and achieve- 
ment for boys. Striking in these studies is the rapid in- 
crease, especially from eight to fourteen, of the sense of 
historic time for historic persons. These long since dead 
are no longer spoken of as now living. Most of these 
choices are direct expressions of real differences of taste 
and character. 

Property, Kline and France ^ have defined as ' ' any- 
thing that the individual may acquire which sustains and 
prolongs life, favors survival, and gives an advantage 
over opposing forces." Many animals and even insects 
store up food both for themselves and for their young. 
Very early in life children evince signs of ownership. 
Letourneau ^ says that the notion of private property, 
which seems to us so natural, dawned late and slowly, and 
that common ownership was the rule among primitive 
people. Value is sometimes measured by use and some- 
times by the work required to produce it. Before pu- 
berty, there is great eagerness to possess things that are 
of immediate service; but after its dawn, the desire of 
possession takes another form, and money for its own 
sake, which is at first rather an abstraction, comes to 
be respected or regarded as an object of extreme de- 
sire, because it is seen to be the embodiment of all values. 



1 The Psychology of Ownership. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 
1899, vol. 6, pp. 421-470. 

2 Property: Its Origin and Development. Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1892, 

219 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

The money sense, as it is now often called, is very complex and 
has not yet been satisfactorily analyzed by psychology. Ribot and 
others trace its origin to prevision which they think animals that 
hoard food feel. Monroe^ has tabulated returns from 977 boys and 
1,090 girls from six to sixteen in answer to the question as to what 
they would do with a small monthly allowance. The following 
table shows the marked increase at the dawn of adolescence of the 
number who would save it: 



Age. 


Boys. 


Girls. 




Age. 


B 


oys. 


Girls. 


7. 


. . 43 per cent 


36 per 


cent 


12.. 


..82 


per cent 


64 per cent 


8. 


..45 " 


34 


u 


13.. 


..88 


a 


78 


9. 


..48 " 


35 


u 


14.. 


..85 


i( 


80 " 


10. 


..58 " 


50 


u 


15.. 


..83 


" 


78 " 


11. 


..71 " 


58 


a 


16.. 


..85 


(I 


82 



This tendency to thrift is strongest in boys, and both sexes often 
show the tendency to moralize, that is so strong in the early teens. 
Much of our school work in arithmetic is dominated by the money 
sense; and school savings-banks, at first for the poor, are now extend- 
ing to children of all classes. This sense tends to prevent pauperism, 
prodigality, is an immense stimulus to the imagination and develops 
purpose to pursue a distant object for a long time. To see all things 
and values in terms of money has, of course, its pedagogic and 
ethical limitations ; but there is a stage where it is a great educational 
advance, and it, too, is full of phylogenetic suggestions. 



Social judgment, croyiies, solitude. — The two follow- 
ing observations afford a glimpse of the development of 
moral judgments. From 1,000 boys and 1,000 girls 
of each age from six to sixteen who answered the 
question as to what should be done to a girl with a 
new box of paints who beautified the parlor chairs 
with them with a wish to please her mother, the follow- 
ing conclusion was drawn." Most of the younger chil- 



1 Money-Sense of Children. Will S. Monroe. Pedagogical Seminary, 
March, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 152-158. 

2 A Study of Children's Rights, as Seen by Themselves. By M. E. 
Schallenberger. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1894, vol. 3, pp. 
87-96. 

220 



THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS 

dren would whip the girl, but from fourteen on the num- 
ber declines very rapidly. Few of the young children 
suggest explaining why it was wrong; while at twelve, 
181, and at sixteen, 751 would explain. The motive 
of the younger children in punishment is revenge ; with 
the older ones that of preventing a repetition of the act 
comes in ; and higher and later comes the purpose of re- 
form. AVith age comes also a marked distinction between 
the act and its motive and a sense of the girl 's ignorance. 
Only the older children would suggest extracting a prom- 
ise not to offend again. Thus with puberty comes a 
change of view-point from judging actions by results to 
judging by motives, and onlj^ the older ones see that 
wrong can be done if there are no bad consequences. 
There is also with increased years a great development 
of the quality of mercy. 

One hundred children of each sex and age between six and sixteen 
were asked what they would do with a burglar, the question stating 
that the penalty was five years in prison. ^ Of the younger children 
nearly nine-tenths ignored the law and fixed upon some other penalty, 
but from twelve years there is a steady advance in those who would 
inflict the legal penalty, while at sixteen, seventy-four per cent would 
have the criminal punished according to law. Thus "with the 
dawn of adolescence at the age of twelve or shortly after comes the 
recognition of a larger life, a life to be lived in common with others, 
and with this recognition the desire to sustain the social code made 
for the common welfare," and punishment is no longer regarded as 
an individual and arbitrary matter. 

From another question answered by 1,914 children ^ it was found 
that with the development of the psychic faculties in youth, there 
was an increasing appreciation of punishment as preventive; an in- 



1 Children's Attitude toward Law. By E. M. Darrah. Barnes's 
Studies in Education, vol. 1, pp. 213-216. (Stanford University, 1897.) 
G. E. Stechert and Co., New York. 

2 Class Punishment. By Caroline Frear. Barnes's Studies in Edu- 
cation^ vol, 1, pp. 332-337. 

221 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

creasing sense of the value of individuality and of the tendency to 
demand protection of personal rights; a change from a sense of 
justice based on feeling and on faith in authority to that based on 
reason and understanding. Children's attitude toward punishment 
for weak time sense, tested by 2,536 children from six to sixteen,^ 
showed also a m^arked pubescent increase in the sense of the need of 
the remedial function of punishment as distinct from the view of it 
as vindictive, or getting even, common in earlier years. There is 
also a marked increase in discriminating the kinds and degrees of 
offenses; in taking account of mitigating circumstances, the incon- 
venience caused others, the involuntary nature of the offense and 
the purpose of the culprit. All this continues to increase up to 
sixteen, where these studies leave the child. 

An interesting effect of the social instinct appears in August 
Mayer's ^ elaborate study made upon fourteen boys in the fifth and 
sixth grade of a Wiirzburg school to determine whether they could 
work better together or alone. The tests were in dictation, mental 
and written arithmetic, memory, and Ebbinghaus's combination 
exercises, and all were given with every practicable precaution to 
make the other conditions uniform. The conclusions demonstrate 
the advantages of collective over individual instruction. Under 
the former condition, emulation is stronger and work more rapid and 
better in quality. From this it is inferred that pupils should not be 
grouped according to ability, for the dull are most stimulated by the 
presence of the bright, the bad by the good, etc. Thus work at 
home is prone to deteriorate, and experimental pedagogy shows 
that the social impulse is on the whole a stronger spur for boys of 
eleven or twelve than the absence of distraction which solitude 
brings. 

From the answers of 1,068 boys and 1,268 girls from seven to six- 
teen on the kind of chum they liked best,^ it appears that with the 
teens children are more anxious for chums that can keep secrets and 
dress neatly, and there is an increased number who are liked for 
qualities that supplement rather than duplicate those of the chooser. 
"There is an apparent struggle between the real actual self and the 
ideal self; a pretty strong desire to have a chum that embodies the 



1 Children's Attitude toward Punishment for Weak Time Sense. By 
D. S. Snedden. Barnes's Studies in Education, vol. 1, pp. 344-351. 

2 Ueber Einzel- und Gesamtleistung des Schulkindes. Archiv fiir die 
gesamte Psychologie, 1 Band, 2 and 3 Heft, 1903, pp. 276-416. 

3 Development of the Social Consciousness of Children. By Will S. 
Monroe. North-Western Monthly, September, 1898, vol. 9, pp. 31-36. 



THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS 

traits youth most desire but which they are conscious of lacking." 
The strong hke the weak; those full of fun the serious; the timid the 
bold; the small the large, etc. Only children^ illustrate differing 
effects of isolation, while "mashes" and "crushes" and ultra-crony- 
ism with "selfishness for two" show the results of abnormal restric- 
tion of the irradiation of the social instinct which should now occur.^ 
M. H. Small, ^ after pointing out that communal animals are more 
intelligent than those with solitary habits, and that even to name 
all the irradiations of the social instinct would be to write a history 
of the human race, studied nearly five hundred cases of eminent men 
who developed proclivities to solitude. It is interesting to observe 
in how many of these cases this was developed in adolescence when, 
with the horror of mediocrity, comes introspection, apathy, irresolu- 
tion, and subjectivism. The grounds of repulsion from society at 
this age may be disappointed hunger for praise, wounded vanity, the 
reaction from over-assertion, or the nursings of some high ideals, as 
it is slowly realized that in society the individual cannot be absolute. 
The motives to self-isolation may be because youth feels its lack of 
physical or moral force to compete with men, or they may be due to 
the failure of others to concede to the exactions of inordinate egotism 
and are directly proportional to the impulse to magnify self, or to 
the remoteness of common social interests from immediate personal 
desire or need, and inversely as the number and range of interests 
seen to be common and the clearness with which social relations are 
reahzed. While maturity of character needs some solitude, too 
much dwarfs it, and more or less of the same paralysis of associa- 
tion follows which is described in the nostalgia of arctic journeys, 
deserts, being lost in the jungle, solitary confinement, and in the 
interesting stories of feral men. ^ In some of these cases the mind is 
saved from entire stultification by pets, imaginary companions, tasks, 
etc. Normally "the tendency to solitude at adolescence indicates 
not fulness but want"; and a judicious balance between rest and 



1 Bohannon: The Only Child in a Family. Pedagogical Seminary 
April, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 475-496. ' 

2 J. Delitsch: Uber Schiilerfreundschaften in einer Volksschulklasse. 
Die Kinderfehler. Fiinfter Jahrgang, Mai, 1900, pp. 150-163. 

3 On Some Psychical Relations of Society and Solitude. Pedagogical 
Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 13-69. 

* A. Rauber: Homo Sapiens Ferus. J. Brehse, Leipzig, 1888. See 
also my Social Aspects of Education; Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1902, 
vol. 9, pp. 81-91. Also Kropotkin: Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution. 
W. Heinemann, London, 1902. 

223 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

work, pursuit of favorite lines, genuine sympathy, and wise com- 
panionship will generally normalize the social relation. 

First forms of spontaneous social organizations. — 
Gulick has studied the propensity of boys from thirteen 
on to consort in gangs, do " dawsies " and stumps, get 
into scrapes together, and fight and suffer for one 
another. The manners and customs of the gang are to 
build shanties or '' hunkies," hunt with sling shots, 
build fires before huts in the woods, cook their squirrels 
and other game, play Indian, build tree-platforms, where 
they smoke or troop about some leader, who may have 
an old revolver. They find or excavate caves, or perhaps 
roof them over ; the barn is a blockhouse or a battle-ship. 
In the early teens boys begin to use frozen snowballs or 
put pebbles in them, or perhaps have stone-fights be- 
tween gangs than which no contiguous African tribes 
could be more hostile. They become toughs and tantalize 
policemen and peddlers; '' lick " every enemy or even 
stranger found alone on their grounds ; often smash win- 
dows; begin to use sticks and brass knuckles in their 
fights ; pelt each other with green apples ; carry shillalahs, 
or perhaps air-rifles. The more plucky arrange fights 
beforehand; rifle unoccupied houses; set ambushes for 
gangs with which they are at feud ; perhaps have secrets 
and initiations where new boys are triced up by the legs 
and butted against trees and rocks. When painted for 
their Indian fights, they may grow so excited as to per- 
haps rush into the water or into the school-room yelling; 
mimic the violence of strikes ; kindle dangerous bonfires ; 
pelt policemen, and shout vile nicknames. 

The spontaneous tendency to develop social and politi- 
cal organizations among boys in pubescent years was well 
seen in a school near Baltimore in the midst of an eight- 
hundred-acre farm richly diversified with swamp and 

224 



THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS. 

forest and abounding with birds, squirrels, rabbits, etc. 
Soon after the opening of this school ^ the boys gathered 
nuts in parties. When a tree was reached which others 
had shaken, an unwritten law soon required those who 
wished to shake it further first to pile up all nuts under 
the tree, while those who failed to do so were universally 
regarded as dishonest and every boy's hand was against 
them. To pile them involved much labor, so that the 
second party usually sought fresh trees, and partial shak- 
ing practically gave possession of all the fruits on a tree. 
They took birds' eggs freely, and whenever a bird was 
found in building, or a squirrel's hole was discovered, 
the finder tacked his name on the tree and thereby con- 
firmed his ownership, as he did if he placed a box in 
which a nest was built. The ticket must not blow off, and 
the right at first lasted only one season. In the rabbit- 
land every trap that was set preempted ground for a 
fixed number of yards about it. Some grasping boys soon 
made many traps and set them all over a valuable district, 
so that the common land fell into a few hands. Traps 
were left out all winter and simply set the next spring. 
All these rights finally came into the ownership of two 
or three boys, who slowly acquired the right and be- 
queathed their claims to others for a consideration, when 
they left school. The monopolists often had a large sur- 
plus of rabbits which they bartered for '' butters," the 
unit being the ounce of daily alloAvance. These could be 
represented by tickets transferred, so that debts were 
paid with " butters " that had never been seen. An 
agrarian party arose and demanded a redistribution of 
land from the monopolists, as Sir Henry Maine shows 

1 Rudimentary Society among Boys, by John H. Johnson, McDonogh, 
Md. McDonogh School, 1893, reprinted from Johns Hopkins University 
Studies Series 2 (Historical and Political Studies, vol. 2, No. 11). 

225 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

often happened in the old village community. Legisla- 
tion and judicial procedure were developed and quarrels 
settled by arbitration, ordeal, and wager, and punishment 
by bumping often followed the decision of the boy folk- 
mote. Scales of prices for commodities in ' ' butters ' ' or 
in pie-currency were evolved, so that we here have an 
almost entirely spontaneous but amazinglj^ rapid recapit- 
ulation of the social development of the race by these 
boys. 

From a study of 1,166 children's organizations de- 
scribed as a language lesson in school composition, Mr. 
Sheldon ^ arrives at some interesting results. American 
children tend strongly to institutional activities, only 
about thirty per cent of all not having belonged to some 
such organization. Imitation plays a very important 
role, and girls take far more kindly than boys to societies 
organized by adults for their benefit. They are also 
more governed by adult and altruistic motives in forming 
their organizations, while boys are nearer to primitive 
man. Before ten comes the period of free spontaneous 
imitation of every form of adult institution. The child 
reproduces sympathetically miniature copies of the life 
around him. On a farm, his play is raking, threshing, 
building barns, or on the seashore he makes ships and 
harbors. In general, he plays family, store, church, and 
chooses officers simply because adults do. The feeling of 
caste, almost absent in the young, culminates about ten 
and declines thereafter. From ten to fourteen, however, 
associations assume a new character; boys especially 
cease to imitate adult organizations and tend to form 
social units characteristic of lower stages of human 
evolution — pirates, robbers, soldiers, lodges, and other 

1 The InstiUitional Activities of American Children. American 
Journal of Psychology, July, 1898, vol. 9, pp. 425-448. 

226 



THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS 

savage reversionary combinations, where the strongest 
and boldest is the leader. They build huts, wear feathers 
and tomahawks as badges, carry knives and toy-pistols, 
make raids and sell the loot. Cowards alone, together 
they fear nothing. Their imagination is perhaps in- 
flamed by flash literature and " penny-dreadfuls." Such 
associations often break out in decadent country com- 
munities where, with fewer and feebler ofl'spring, lax 
notions of family discipline prevail and hoodlumism is 
the direct result of the passing of the rod. These bar- 
baric societies have their place and give vigor ; but if un- 
reduced later, as in many unsettled portions of this 
country, a semisavage state of society results. At twelve 
the predatory function is normally subordinated, and if 
it is not it becomes dangerous, because the members are 
no longer satisfied with mere play, but are stronger and 
abler to do harm, and the spice of danger and its fascina- 
tion may issue in crime. Athleticism is now the form 
into which these wilder instincts can be best transmuted, 
and where they find harmless and even wholesome vent. 
Another change early in adolescence is the increased num- 
ber of social, literary, and even philanthropic organiza- 
tions and institutions for mutual help — perhaps against 
vice, for having a good time, or for holding picnics and 
parties. Altruism now begins to make itself felt as a 
motive. 

Student life and organizations. Student life is per- 
haps the best of all fields, unworked though it is, for 
studying the natural history of adolescence. Its modern 
record is over eight hundred years old and it is marked 
with the signatures of every age, yet has essential features 
that do not vary. Cloister and garrison rules have never 
been enforced even in the hospice, bursa, inn, '' house," 

227 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

' ' hall, ' ' or dormitory, and m loco parentis ^ practises 
are impossible, especially with large numbers. The very 
word ' ' school ' ' means leisure^ and in a world of toil and 
moil suggests paradise. Some have urged that elite 
youth, exempt from the struggle to live and left to the 
freedom of their own inclinations, might serve as a bio- 
logical and ethnic compass to point out the goal of hu- 
man destiny. But the spontaneous expressions of this 
best age and condition of life, with no other occupation 
than their own development, have shown reversions as 
often as progress. The rupture of home ties stimulates 
every wider vicarious expression of the social instinct. 
Each taste and trait can find congenial companionship in 
others and thus be stimulated to more intensity and self- 
consciousness. Very much that has been hitherto re- 
pressed in the adolescent soul is now reenforced by asso- 
ciation and may become excessive and even aggressive. 
While many of the race-correlates of childhood are lost, 
those of this stage are more accessible in savage and sub- 
savage life. Freedom is the native air and vital breath of 
student life. The sense of personal liberty is absolutely 
indispensable for moral maturity; and just as truth can 
not be found without the possibility of error, so the posse 
nonpeccare^ precedes the '?^o?^ posse peccare,^ and profes- 
sors must make a broad application of the rule ahiisus non 
tollit usum.^ The student must have much freedom to be 
lazy, make his own minor morals, vent his disrespect for 
what he can see no use in, be among strangers to act him- 
self out and form a personality of his own, be baptized 
with the revolutionary and skeptical spirit, and go to 
extremes at the age when excesses teach wisdom with 



In place of a parent. ^ Ability not to sin. 

Inability to sin. « Abuse does not do away with use. 

228 



THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS 

amazing rapidity, if he is to become a true loaight of the 
spirit and his own master. Ziegler ^ frankly told Ger- 
man students that about one-tenth of them would be 
morally lost in this process, but insisted that on the whole 
more good was done than by restraint; for, he said, 
" youth is now in the stage of Schiller's bell when it 
w^as molten metaL" 

Of all safeguards I believe a rightly cultivated sense 
of honor is the most effective at this age. Sadly as the 
unwritten code of student honor in all lands needs re- 
vision, and partial, freaky, and utterly perverted, tainted 
and cowardly as it often is, it really means what Kant 
expressed in the sublime precept, " Thou canst because 
thou oughtest. ' ' Fichte said that Faiilkeit, Feiglieit, and 
Falschheit - were the three dishonorable things for stu- 
dents. If they would study the history and enter into 
the spirit of their own fraternities, they would often have 
keener and broader ideas of honor to which they are 
happily so sensitive. If professors made it always a 
point of honor to confess and never to conceal the limita- 
tion of their knowledge, would scorn all pretense of it, 
place credit for originality frankly where it belongs, 
teach no creeds they do not profoundly believe, or topics 
in which they are not interested, and withhold nothing 
from those who want the truth, they could from this 
vantage with more effect bring students to feel that the 
laziness that, w^hile outwardly conforming, does no real 
inner work ; that getting a diploma, as a professor lately 
said, an average student could do, on one hour's study a 
day; living beyond one's means, and thus imposing a 
hardship on parents greater than the talent of the son 

1 Der deutsche Student am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. 6th Ed. 
Goschen, Leipzig, 1896. 

2 Laziness, cowardice, falsehood. 

229 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

justifies ; accepting stipends not needed, especially to the 
deprivation of those more needy; using dishonest ways 
of securing rank in studies or positions on teams, or 
social standing, are, one and all, not only ungentlemanly 
but cowardly and mean, and the axe would be laid at 
the root of the tree. Honor should impel students to go 
nowhere where they conceal their college, their fraternity, 
or even their name ; to keep themselves immaculate from 
all contact with that class of women which, Ziegler states, 
brought twenty-five per cent of the students of the Uni- 
versity of Berlin in a single year to physicians; to re- 
member that other 's sisters are as cherished as their own ; 
to avoid those sins against confiding innocence which cry 
for vengeance, as did Valentine against Faust, and which 
strengthen the hate of social classes and make mothers 
and sisters seem tedious because low ideas of womanhood 
have been implanted, and which give a taste for mucky 
authors that reek with suggestiveness ; and to avoid the 
waste of nerve substance and nerve weakness in ways 
which Ibsen and Tolstoi have described. These things 
are the darkest blot on the honor of youth. 

Associations for youth devised or guided hy adults. 
Here we enter a very different realm. Forbush ^ under- 

1 The Social Pedagogy of Boyhood. Pedagogical Seminary, October^ 
1900, vol. 7, pp. 307-346. See also his The Boy Problem, with an intro- 
duction by G. Stanley Hall, The Pilgrim Press, Boston, 1901, p. 194. 
Also Winifred Buck (Boys' Self-governing Clubs, Macmillan, New 
York, 1903), who thinks ten million dollars could be used in training 
club advisers who should have the use of schools and grounds after 
hours and evenings, conduct excursions, organize games, etc., but 
avoid all direct teaching and book work generally. This writer thinks 
such an institution would soon result in a marked increase of public 
morality and an augmented demand for technical instruction, and 
that for the advisers themselves the work would be the best training 
for high positions in politics and reform. Clubs of boys from eight to 
sixteen or eighteen must not admit age disparities of more than two 
years. 

230 



THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS 

takes an analysis of many such clubs which he divides 
according to their purpose into nine chief classes : physi- 
cal training, handicraft, literary, social, civic and patri- 
otic, science-study, hero-love, ethical, religious. These he 
classifies as to age of the boj^s, his purview generally end- 
ing at seventeen ; discusses and tabulates the most favor- 
able number, the instincts chiefly utilized, the kinds of 
education gained in each and its percentage of interest, 
and the qualities developed. He commends Riis's mode 
of pulling the safety-valve of a rather dangerous boy- 
gang by becoming an adult honorary member, and inter- 
preting the impulsions of this age in the direction of ad- 
venture instead of in that of mischief. He reminds us 
that nearly one-third of the inhabitants of America are 
adolescents, that 3,000,000 are boys between twelve and 
sixteen, ^' that the so-called heathen people are, what- 
ever their age, all in the adolescent stage of life. ' ' 

A few American societies of this class we may briefly 
characterize as follows: 



(a) Typical of a large class of local juvenile clubs is the ''Cap- 
tains of Ten," originally for boys of from eight to fourteen, and with 
a later graduate squad of those over fifteen. The ''Ten" are the 
fingers; and whitthng, scrap-book making, mat- weaving, etc., are 
taught. The motto is, "The hand of the diligent shall bear rule " ; its 
watchword is "Loyalty"; and the prime objects are "to promote a 
spirit of loyalty to Christ among the boys of the club," and to learn 
about and work for Christ's kingdom. The members wear a silver 
badge; have an annual photograph; elect their leaders; vote their 
money to missions (on which topic they hold meetings); act Bible 
stories in costume ; hear stories and see scientific experiments ; enact 
a Chinese school; write articles for the children's department of re- 
ligious journals; develop comradeship, and "have a good time." 

(h) The Agassiz Association, founded in 1875 "to encourage 
personal work in natural science," now numbers some 25,000 mem- 
bers, with chapters distributed all over the country, and was said by 
the late Professor Hyatt to include "the largest number of persons 
16 231 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

ever bound together for the purpose of mutual help in the study of 
nature." It furnishes practical courses of study in the sciences; 
has local chapters in thousands of towns and cities in this and other 
countries; publishes a monthly organ. The Swiss Cross, to facilitate 
correspondence and exchange of specimens; has a small endowment, 
a badge, is incorporated, and is animated by a spirit akin to that of 
University Extension; and, although not exclusively for young 
people, is chiefly sustained by them. 

(c) The Catholic Total Abstinence Union is a strong, well- 
organized, and widely extended society, mostly composed of young 
men. The pledge required of all members explains its object: "I 
promise, with the Divine assistance and in honor of the Sacred Thirst 
and the Agony of our Saviour, to abstain from all intoxicating drinks 
and to prevent as much as possible by advice and example the sin 
of intemperance in others and to discountenance the drinking cus- 
toms of society." A general convention of the Union has been held 
annually since 1877. 

(d) The Princely Knights of Character Castle is an organiza- 
tion founded in 1895 for boys from twelve to eighteen to ''inculcate, 
disseminate, and practise the principles of heroism — endurance — 
love, purity, and patriotism." The central incorporated castle 
grants charters to local castles, directs the ritual and secret work. 
Its officers are supreme prince, patriarch, scribe, treasurer, director, 
with captain of the guard, watchman, porter, keeper of the dungeon, 
musician, herald, and favorite son. The degrees of the secret work 
are shepherd lad, captive, viceroy, brother, son, prince, knight, and 
royal knight. There are jewels, regalia, paraphernalia, and initia- 
tions. The pledge for the first degree is, ''I hereby promise and 
pledge that I will abstain from the use of intoxicating liquor in any 
form as a beverage ; that I will not use profane or improper language ; 
that I will discourage the use of tobacco in any form; that I will 
strive to live pure in body and mind; that I will obey all rules and 
regulations of the order, and not reveal any of the secrets in any 
way." There are benefits, reliefs, passwords, a list of offenses and 
penalties. 

(e) Some 35,000 Bands of Mercy are now organized under the 
direction of the American Humane Education Society. The object 
of the organization is to cultivate kindness to animals and sympathy 
with the poor and oppressed. The prevention of cruelty in driving, 
cattle transportation, humane methods of killing, care for the sick 
and abandoned or overworked animals, are the themes of most of its 
voluminous literature. It has badges, hymn-books, cards, and 
certificates of membership, and a motto, "Kindness, Justice, and 

232 



THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS 

Mercy to All." Its pledge is, "I will try to be kind to all harmless 
living creatures, and try to protect them from cruel usage," and is 
intended to include human as well as dumb creatures. The founder 
and secretary, with great and commendable energy, has instituted 
prize contests for speaking on humane subjects in schools, and has 
printed and circulated prize stories; since the incorporation of the 
society in 1868, he has been indefatigable in collecting funds, speak- 
ing before schools and colleges, and prints fifty to sixty thousand 
copies of the monthly organ. In addition to its mission of sentiment, 
and to make it more effective, this organization clearly needs to 
make more provision for the intellectual element by well-selected or 
constructed courses, or at least references on the life, history, habits, 
and instincts of animals, and it also needs more recognition that 
modern charity is a science as well as a virtue. 

(/) The Coming Men of America, although organized only in 
1894, now claims to be the greatest chartered secret society for boys 
and young men in the country. It began two years earlier in a 
lodge started by a nineteen-year-old boy in Chicago in imitation of 
such ideas of Masons, Odd-Fellows, etc., as its founder could get 
from his older brother, and its meetings were first held in a base- 
ment. On this basis older heads aided in its development, so that 
it is a good example of the boy-imitative helped out by parents. The 
organization is now represented in every State and Territory, and 
boys travel on its badge. There is an official organ. The Star, a 
badge, sign, and a secret sign language called " bestography." Its 
secret ritual work is highly praised. Its membership is limited to 
white boys under twenty-one. 

(gr) The first Harry Wadsworth Club was established in 1871 
as a result of E. E. Hale's Ten Times One, published the year before. 
Its motto is, "Look up, and not down; look forward, and not back; 
look out, and not in; lend a hand," or "Faith, Hope, and Charity." 
Its organ is the Ten Times One Ptecord; its badge is a silver Maltese 
cross. Each club may organize as it will, and choose its own name, 
provided it accepts the above motto. Its watchword is, "In His 
Name." It distributes charities, conducts a Noonday Rest, outings 
in the country, and devotes itself to doing good. ^ 

1 See Young People's Societies, by L. W. Bacon. D. Appleton and 
Co., New York, 1900, p. 265. Also, F. G. Cressey: The Church and 
Young Men. Fleming H. Revell Co., New York, 1903, p. 233. 



233 



CHAPTER X 

INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

The general change and plasticity at puberty — English teaching — Causes 
of its failure: (1) too much time to other languages, (2) subordination 
of literary content to form, (3) too early stress on eye and hand in- 
stead of ear and mouth, (4) excessive use of concrete words — Chil- 
dren's interest in words — Their favorites — Slang — Story telling — Age 
of reading crazes — What to read — The historic sense — Growth of 
memory span. 

Just as about the only duty of young children is 
implicit obedience, so the chief mental training from 
about eight to twelve is arbitrary memorization, drill, 
habituation, with only limited appeal to the understand- 
ing. After the critical transition age of six or seven, 
when the brain has achieved its adult size and weight, 
and teething has reduced the chewing surface to its 
least extent, begins a unique stage of life marked by 
reduced growth and increased activity and power to 
resist both disease and fatigue, which suggests what 
was, in some just post-simian age of our race, its period 
of maturity. Here belong discipline in writing, read- 
ing, spelling, verbal memory, manual training, practise 
of instrumental technic, proper names, drawing, drill 
in arithmetic, foreign languages by oral methods, the 
correct pronunciation of which is far harder if acquired 
later, etc. The hand is never so near the brain. Most 
of the content of the mind has entered it through the 
senses, and the eye- and ear-gates should be open at their 
widest. Authority should now take precedence of rea- 

234 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

son. Children comprehend much and very rapidly iJ: 
we can only refrain from explaining, but this slows down 
intuition, tends to make casuists and prigs and to en- 
feeble the ultimate vigor of reason. It is the age of 
little method and much matter. The good teacher is 
now a pedotrieh, or boy-driver. Boys of this age are 
now not very affectionate. They take pleasure in 
obliging and imitating those they like and perhaps in 
disobliging those they dislike. They have much sel- 
fishness and little sentiment. As this period draws to a 
close and the teens begin, the average normal child will 
not be bookish but should read and write well, know a 
few dozen well-chosen books, play several dozen games, 
be well started in one or more ancient and modern lan- 
guages — if these must be studied at all, should know 
something of several industries and how to make many 
things he is interested in, belong to a few teams and 
societies, know much about nature in his environment, 
be able to sing and draw, should have memorized much 
more than he now does, and be acquainted, at least 
in story form, with the outlines of many of the best 
works in literature and the epochs and persons in his- 
tory.^ Morally he should have been through many 
if not most forms of what parents and teachers com- 
monly call " badness," and Professor Yoder even calls 
' ' meanness. ' ' He should have fought, whipped and been 
whipped, used language offensive to the prude and to 
the prim precisian, been in some scrapes, had something 
to do with bad, if more with good, associates, and been 
exposed to and already recovering from as many forms 
of ethical mumps and measles as, by having in mild 
form now he can be rendered immune to later when 

1 See my Ideal School as Based on Child Study. Proceedings of the 
National Educational Association, 1901, pp. 475-490. 

235 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

they become far more dangerous, because his moral and 
religious as well as his rational nature is normally 
rudimentary. He is not depraved, but only in a savage 
or half -animal stage, although to a large-brained, large- 
hearted and truly parental soul that does not call what 
causes it inconvenience by opprobrious names, an al- 
together lovable and even fascinating stage. The more 
we know of boyhood the more narroAv and often selfish 
do adult ideals of it appear. Something is amiss with 
the lad of ten who is very good, studious, industrious, 
thoughtful, altruistic, quiet, polite, respectful, obedient, 
gentlemanly, orderly, always in good toilet, docile to 
reason, who turns away from stories that reek with gore, 
prefers adult companionship to that of his mates, re- 
fuses all low associates, speaks standard English, or is 
as pious and deeply in love with religious services as the 
typical maiden teacher or the a la mode parent wishes. 
Such a boy is either under-vitalized and anemic and 
precocious by nature, a repressed, overtrained, conven- 
tionalized manikin, a hypocrite, as some can become 
under pressure thus early in life, or else a genius of 
some kind with a little of all these. 

But with the teens all this begins to be changed and 
many of these precepts must be gradually reversed. 
There is an outburst of growth that needs a large part 
of the total kinetic energy of the body. There is a 
new interest in adults, a passion to be treated like one's 
elders, to make plans for the future, a new sensitive- 
ness to adult praise or blame. The large muscles have 
their innings and there is a new clumsiness of body and 
mind. The blood-vessels expand and blushing is in- 
creased, new sensations and feelings arise, the imagina- 
tion blossoms, love of nature is born, music is felt in 
a new, more inward way, fatigue comes easier and 

236 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

sooner; and if heredity and environment enable the in- 
dividual to cross this bridge successfully there is some- 
times almost a break of continuity, and a new being 
emerges. The drill methods of the preceding period 
must be slowly relaxed and new appeals made to free- 
dom and interest. We can no longer coerce a break, 
but must lead and inspire if we would avoid arrest. 
Individuality must have a longer tether. Never is the 
power to appreciate so far ahead of the power to ex- 
press, and never does understanding so outstrip ability 
to explain. Overaccuracy is atrophy. Both mental and 
moral acquisition sink at once too deep to be repro- 
duced by examination without injury both to intellect 
and will. There is nothing in the environment to 
which the adolescent nature does not keenly respond. 
With pedagogic tact we can teach about everything we 
know that is really worth knowing; but if we amplify 
and morselize instead of giving great wholes, if we let 
the hammer that strikes the bell rest too long against 
it and deaden the sound, and if we wait before each 
methodic step till the pupil has reproduced all the last, 
we starve and retard the soul, which is now all insight 
and receptivity. Plasticity is at its maximum, utter- 
ance at its minimum. The inward traffic obstructs the 
outer currents. Boys especially are often dumb-bound, 
monophrastic, inarticulate, and semi-aphasic save in 
their own vigorous and inelegant way. Nature prompts 
to a modest reticence for which the deflowerers of all 
ephebic naivete should have some respect. Deep in- 
terests arise which are almost as sacred as is the hour 
of visitation of the Holy Ghost to the religious teacher. 
The mind at times grows in leaps and bounds in a way 
that seems to defy the great enemy, fatigue; and yet 
when the teacher grows a little tiresome the pupil is 

237 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

tired in a moment. Thus we have the converse danger 
of forcing knowledge upon unwilling and unripe minds 
that have no love for it, which is in many ways psy- 
chologically akin to a nameless crime that in some parts 
of the country meets summary vengeance. 

(A) The heart of education as well as its phyletic 
root is the vernacular literature and language. These 
are the chief instruments of the social as well as of the 
ethnic and patriotic instinct. The prime place of the 
former we saw in the last chapter, and we now pass to 
the latter, the uniqueness of which should first be con- 
sidered. 

The Century, the largest complete dictionary of English, claims 
to have 250,000 words, as against 55,000 in the old Webster's Un- 
abridged. Worcester's Unabridged of 1860 has 105,000; Murray's, 
now in L, it is said, will contain 240,000 principal and 140,000 com- 
pound words, or 380,000 words in all. The dictionary of the French 
Academy has 33,000; that of the Royal Spanish Academy, 50,000; 
the Dutch dictionary of Van Dale, 86,000; the Italian and Portuguese, 
each about 50,000 literary, or 150,000 encyclopedic words. Of course, 
words can really be counted hardly more than ideas or impressions, 
and compounds, dialects, obsolete terms, localisms, and especially 
technical terms, swell the number indefinitely. A competent phi- 
lologist ^ says, if given large liberty, he "will undertake to supply 
1 ,000,000 English words for 1 ,000,000 American dollars. ' ' Chamber- 
lain ^ estimates that our language contains more than two score 
as many words as all those left us from the Latin. Many savage 
languages contain only a very few thousand, and some but a few 
hundred, words. Our tongue is essentially Saxon in its vocabulary 
and its spirit and, from the time when it was despised and vulgar, 
has followed an expansion policy, swallowing with little modification 
terms not only from classical antiquity, but from all modern languages 
' — Indian, African, Chinese, Mongolian — according to its needs, its 

1 Charles P. G. Scott: The Number of Words in the Enghsh and Other 
Languages. Princeton University Bulletin, May, 1902, vol. 13, pp. 
106-111. 

2 The Teaching of English. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1902, 
vol. 9, pp. 161-168. 

238 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

adopted children far outnumbering those of its own blood. It 
absorbs at its will the slang of the street gamin, the cant of thieves 
and beggars; is actually creative in the baby talk of mothers and 
nurses; drops, forgets, and actually invents new words with no pedi- 
gree like those of Lear, Carrol, and many others.^ 

In this vast field the mind of the child early begins to take flight. 
Here his soul finds its native breath and vital air. He may live as a 
peasant, using, as Max Midler says many do, but a few hundred words 
during his lifetime; or he may need 8,000, like Milton, 15,000, like 
Shakespeare, 20,000 or 30,000, like Huxley, who commanded both 
literary and technical terms; while in understanding, which far out- 
strips use, a philologist may master perhaps 100,000 or 200,000 words. 
The content of a tongue may contain only folk-lore and terms for 
immediate, practical hfe, or this content may be indefinitely elabor- 
ated in a rich literature and science. The former is generally well on 
in its development before speech itself becomes an object of study. 
Greek literature was fully grown when the Sophists, and finally 
Aristotle, developed the rudiments of grammar, the parts of speech 
being at first closely related with his ten metaphysical categories. 
Our modern tongue had the fortune, unknown to those of antiquity, 
when it was crude and despised, to be patronized and regulated by 
Latin grammarians, and has had a long experience, both for good 
and evil, with their conserving and uniformitizing instincts. It has, 
too, a long history of resistance to this control. Once spelling was a 
matter of fashion or even individual taste; and as the constraint 
grew, two pedagogues in the thirteenth century fought a duel for the 
right spelling of the word, and that maintained by the survivor 
prevailed. Phonic and economic influences are now again making 
some headway against orthographic orthodoxy here ; so with defini- 
tions. In the days of Johnson's dictionary, individuality still had 
wide range in determining meanings. In pronunciation, too: we 
may now pronounce the word tomato in six ways, all sanctioned by 
dictionaries. Of our tongue in particular it is true, as Tylor says 
in general, condensing a longer passage, ''take language all in all, it 
is the product of a rough-and-ready ingenuity and of the great rule 
of thumb. It is an old barbaric engine, which in its highest develop- 
ment is altered, patched, and tinkered into capability. It is originally 
and naturally a product of low culture, developed by ages of con- 
scious and unconscious improvement to answer more or less per- 
fectly the requirements of modern civilization." 

1 See my Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self. American 
Jovimal of Psychology, April, 1898, vol. 9, pp. 351-395. 

239 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

It is plain, therefore, that no grammar, and least 
of all that derived from the prim, meager Latin con- 
tingent of it, is adequate to legislate for the free spirit 
of our magnificent tongue. Again, if this is ever done 
and English ever has a grammar that is to it what Latin 
grammar is to that language, it will only be when the 
psychology of speech represented, e. g., in Wundt's 
Psychologic der Sprache,^ which is now compiling and 
organizing the best elements from all grammars, is com- 
plete. The reason why English speakers find such diffi- 
culty in learning other languages is because ours has 
so far outgrown them by throwing off not only inflec- 
tions but many old rules of syntax, that we have had to 
go backward to an earlier and more obsolescent stage 
of human development. In 1414, at the Council of 
Constance, when Emperor Sigismund was rebuked for 
a wrong gender, he replied, ' ' I am King of the Romans 
and above grammar." Thomas Jefferson later wrote, 
*' Where strictness of grammar does not weaken ex- 
pression it should be attended to ; but where by a small 
grammatical negligence the energ}^ of an idea is con- 
densed or a word stands for a sentence, I hold gram- 
matical rigor in contempt." Browning, Whitman, and 
Kipling deliberately violate grammar and secure thereby 
unique effects neither asking nor needing excuse. 

By general consent both high school and college 
youth in this country are in an advanced stage of de- 
generation in the command of this the world's greatest 
organ of the intellect; and that, despite the fact that 
the study of English often continues from primary 
into college grades, that no topic counts for more, and 

1 Sprachgeschi elite und Sprachpsychologie, mit Riicksicht auf B. 
Delbriick's "Grundfragen der Sprachforschung." Leipzig, W. Engel- 
mann, 1901. 

240 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

that marked deficiency here often debars from all other 
courses. Every careful study of the subject for nearly 
twenty years shows deterioration, and Professor Shur- 
man, of Nebraska, thinks it now worse than at any 
time for forty years. We are in the case of many 
Christians described by Dante who strove by prayers 
to get nearer to God when in fact with every petition 
they were departing farther from him. Such a compre- 
hensive fact must have many causes. 

I. One of these is the excessive time given to other 
languages just at the psychological period of greatest 
linguistic plasticity and capacity for growth. School 
invention and tradition is so inveterate that it is hard 
for us to understand that there is little educational 
value — and perhaps it is deeducational — to learn to tell 
the time of day or name a spade in several different 
tongues or to learn to say the Lord's Prayer in many 
different languages, any one of which the Lord only 
can understand. The polyglot people that one nieets 
on great international highwaj^s of travel are linguists 
only in the sense that the moke on the variety stage who 
plays a dozen instruments equally badly is a musician. 
It is a psychological impossibility to pass through the 
apprenticeship stage of learning foreign languages at 
the age when the vernacular is setting without crippling 
it. The extremes are the youth in ancient Greece study- 
ing his own language only and the modern high school 
boy and girl dabbling in three or perhaps four lan- 
guages. Latin, which in the eight years preceding 1898 
increased one hundred and seventy-four per cent in 
American high schools, while the proportion entering 
college in the country and even in Massachusetts steadily 
declined, is the chief offender. In the day of its peda- 
gogical glory Latin was the universal tongue of the 

241 



YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

learned. Sturm's idea was to train boys so that if sud- 
denly transported to ancient Rome or Greece they would 
be at home there. Language, it was said, was the chief 
instrument of culture; Latin, the chief language and 
therefore a better drill in the vernacular than the ver- 
nacular itself. Its rules were wholesome swathing bands 
for the modern languages when in their infancy. Boys 
must speak only Latin on the playground. They 
thought, felt, and developed an intellectual life in and 
with that tongue.^ But how changed all this is now. 
Statistical studies show that five hours a week for a 
year gives command of but a few hundred words, that 
two years does not double this number, and that com- 
mand of the language and its resources in the original 
is almost never attained, but that it is abandoned not 
only by the increasing percentage that do not go to 
college but also by the increasing percentage who drop 
it forever at the college door. Its enormous numerical 
increase due to high school requirements, the increas- 
ing percentage of girl pupils more ready to follow the 
teacher's advice^ in connection Avith the deteriorating 
quality of the girls — inevitable with their increasing 
numbers, the sense that Latin means entering upon a 
higher education, the special reverence for it by Catho- 
lic children, the overcrowded market for Latin teachers 
whom a recent writer says can be procured by the score 
at less rates than in almiost any other subject, the mod- 
ern methods of teaching it which work well with less 
knowledge of it by the teacher than in the case of 
other school topics, have been attended perhaps in- 
evitably by steady pedagogic decline despite the vaunted 
new methods; until noAV the baby Latin in the average 

1 Latin in the High School. By Edward Conradi. Pedagogical Semi- 
nary, March, 1905, vol. 12, pp. 1-26. 

242 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

high school class is a kind of sanctified relic, a ghost 
of a ghost, suggesting Swift's Struldbrugs, doomed to 
physical immortality but shriveling and with increasing 
horror of all things new. In 1892 the German emperor 
declared it a shame for a boy to excel in Latin com- 
position, and in the high schools of Sweden and Norway 
it has been practically abandoned. In the present stage 
of its educational decadence the power of the dead hand 
is strongly illustrated by the new installation of the old 
Roman pronunciation with which our tongue has only 
remote analogies, which makes havoc with proper 
names, which is unknown and unrecognized in the 
schools of the European continent, and which makes a 
pedantic affectation out of mere vocalism. I do not 
know nor care whether the old Romans pronounced 
thus or not, but if historic fidelity in this sense has 
pedagogic justification, why still teach a text like the 
Viri Romce, which is not a classic but a modern peda- 
gogue's composition? 

I believe profoundly in the Latin both as a university specialty 
and for all students who even approach mastery, but for the vast 
numbers who stop in the early stages of proficiency it is disastrous 
to the vernacular. Compare the evils of translation English, which 
not even the most competent and laborious teaching can wholly 
prevent and which careless mechanical instruction directly fosters, 
with the vigorous fresh productions of a boy or girl writing or speak- 
ing of something of vital present interest. The psychology of trans- 
lation shows that it gives the novice a consciousness of etymologies 
which rather impedes than helps the free movement of the mind. 
Jowett said in substance that it is almost impossible to render either 
of the great dead languages into English without compromise, and 
this tends to injure the idiomatic mastery of one's own tongue, which 
can be got only by much hard experience in uttering our own thoughts 
before trying to shape the dead thoughts of others into our language. 
We confound the little knowledge of word-histories which Latin 
gives with the far higher and subtler sentence-sense which makes 
the soul of one language so different from that of another, and train- 

243 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

ing in which ought not to end until one has become more or less of a 
stylist and knows how to hew out modes of expressing his own in- 
dividuality in a great language. There is a sense in which Macaulay 
was not an Englishman at all, but a Ciceronian Latinist who foisted 
an alien style upon our tongue ; and even Addison is a foreigner com- 
pared to the virile Kipling. The nature and needs of the adolescent 
mind demand bread and meat, while Latin rudiments are husks. 
In his autobiography, Booker Washington says that for ten years 
after their emancipation, the two chief ambitions of the young negro 
of the South were to hold office and to study Latin, and he adds that 
the chief endeavor of his life has been against these tendencies. For 
the American boy and girl, high school too often means Latin. This 
gives at first a pleasing sense of exaltation to a higher stage of life, 
but after from one to three years the great majority who enter the 
high school drop out limp and discouraged for many reasons, largely, 
however, because they are not fed. Recent studies of truancy have 
shown a strong but strangely unconscious association between run- 
aways and a bad dietary at home. Defective nutrition of the mind 
also causes a restlessness, which enhances all the influences which 
make boys and girls leave school. 

II. The second cause of this degeneration is the 
subordination of literature and content to language 
study. Grammar arises in the old age of language. As 
once applied to our relatively grammarless tongue it 
always was more or less of a school-made artifact and 
an alien yoke, and has become increasingly so as English 
has grown great and free. Its ghost, in the many text- 
books devoted to it, lacks just the quality of logic which 
made and besouled it. Philology, too, with all its mag- 
nificence, is not a product of the nascent stages of 
speech. In the college, which is its stronghold, it has 
so inspired professors of English that their ideal is to 
be critical rather than creative till they prefer the 
minute reading of a few masterpieces to a wide gen- 
eral knowledge, and a typical university announces that 
*' in every case the examiners will treat mere knowledge 
of books as less important than the ability to write good 

244 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

English ' ' that will parse and that is spelled, punctuated, 
capitalized, and paragraphed aright. Good professors 
of English literature are hard to find, and upon them 
philologists, who are plentiful, look with a certain con- 
descension. Many academic chairs of English are filled 
by men whose acquaintance of our literature is very 
narrow, who wish to be linguistic and not literary, and 
this is true even in ancient tongues. 

At a brilliant examination, a candidate for the doctor's degree 
who had answered many questions concerning the forms of Lucretius, 
when asked whether he was a dramatist, historian, poet, or phi- 
losopher, did not know, and his professor deemed the question im- 
proper. I visited the eleventh recitation in Othello in a high school 
class of nineteen pupils, not one of whom knew how the story ended, 
so intent had they been kept on its verbiage. Hence, too, has come 
the twelve feet of text-books on English on my shelves with many 
standard works, edited for schools, with more notes than text. 
Fashion that works from above down the grades and college entrance 
requirements are in large measure responsible for this, perhaps now 
the worst case of the prostitution of content to form. 

Long exposure to this method of linguistic manicuring tends to 
make students who try to write ultra-fastidiously, seeking an over- 
refined elaboration of petty trifles, as if the less the content the 
greater the triumph of form alone could be. These petty but pretty 
nothings are like German confectionery, that appeals to the eye but 
has little for taste and is worse than nothing for the digestion. It is 
like straining work on an empty stomach. For youth this em- 
broidery of details is the precocious senescence that Nordau has so 
copiously illustrated as literary decadence. Language is vastly 
larger than all its content, and the way to teach it is to focus the 
mind upon story, history, oratory, drama, Bible, for their esthetic, 
mental, and above all, moral content, as shown in the last chapter. 
The more unconscious processes that reflect imitatively the linguistic 
environment and that strike out intuitively oral and written vents 
for interests so intense that they must be told and shared, are what 
teach us how to command the resources of our mother tongue. 
These prescriptions and corrections and consciousness of the mani- 
fold ways of error are never so peculiarly liable to hinder rather than 
to help as in early adolescence, when the soul has a new content 
and a new sense for it, and so abhors and is so incapable of precision 

245 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

and propriety of diction. To hold up the flights of exuberant youth 
by forever being on the hunt for errors is, to borrow the language of 
the gridiron, low tackle, and I would rather be convicted of many 
errors by such methods than use them. Of course this has its 
place, but it must always be subordinated to a larger view, as in one 
of the newly discovered logia ascribed to Jesus, who, when he found 
a man gathering sticks on Sunday, said to him, "If you understand 
what you are doing, it is well, but if not, thou shalt be damned." 
The great teacher who, when asked how he obtained such rare 
results in expression, answered, "By carefully neglecting it and 
seeking utter absorption in subject-matter," was also a good prac- 
tical psychologist. This is the inveterate tendency that in other ages 
has made pedagogic scribes, Talmudists, epigoni, and sophists, who 
have magnified the letter and lost the spirit. But there are yet 
other seats of difficulty. 

III. It is hard and, in the history of the race, a 
late change, to receive language through the eye which 
reads instead of through the ear which hears. Not 
only is perception measurably quite distinctly slower, 
but book language is related to oral speech somewhat 
as an herbarium is to a garden, or a museum of stuffed 
specimens to a menagerie. The invention of letters 
is a novelty in the history of the race that spoke for 
countless ages before it wrote. The winged word of 
mouth is saturated with color, perhaps hot with feeling, 
musical with inflection, is the utterance of a living 
present personality, the consummation of man's gre- 
garious instincts. The book is dead and more or less 
impersonal, best apprehended in solitude, its matter 
more intellectualized ; it deals in remoter second-hand 
knowledge so that Plato reproached Aristotle as being 
a reader, one remove from the first spontaneous source 
of original impressions and ideas, and the doughty 
medieval knights scorned reading as a mere clerk 's trick, 
not wishing to muddle their wits with other people's 
ideas when their own were good enough for them. But 

246 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

although some of the great men in history could not 
read, and though some of the illiterate were often mor- 
ally and intellectually above some of the literate, the 
argument here is that the printed page must not be too 
suddenly or too early thrust between the child and life. 
The plea is for more oral and objective work, more 
stories, narratives, and even vivid readings, as is now 
done statedly in more than a dozen of the public li- 
braries of the country, not so often by teachers as by 
librarians, all to the end that the ear, the chief 
receptacle of language, be maintained in its dominance, 
that the fine sense of sound, rhythm, cadence, pro- 
nunciation, and speech-music generally be not atrophied, 
that the eye which normally ranges freely from far to 
near be not injured by the confined treadmill and zigzag 
of the printed page. 

Closely connected with this, and perhaps psychologi- 
cally worse, is the substitution of the pen and the 
scribbling fingers for the mouth and tongue. Speech 
is directly to and from the soul. Writing, the delib- 
eration of which fits age better than youth, slows down 
its impetuosity many fold, and is in every way farther 
removed from vocal utterance than is the eye from the 
ear. Never have there been so many pounds of paper, 
so many pencils, and such excessive scribbling as in the 
calamopapyrus ^ pedagogy of to-day and in this country. 
Not only has the daily theme spread as an infection, 
but the daily lesson is now extracted through the point 
of a pencil instead of from the mouth. The tongue 
rests and the curve of writer's cramp takes a sharp 
turn upward, as if we were making scribes, reporters, 
and proof-readers. In some schools, teachers seem to 

1 Pen-paper, 

17 247 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

be condueting correspondence classes with their own 
pupils. It all makes excellent busy work, keeps the 
pupils quiet and orderly, and allows the school output 
to be quantified, and some of it gives time for more 
care in the choice of words. But is it a gain to sub- 
stitute a letter for a visit, to try to give written 
precedence over spoken forms? Here again we violate 
the great law that the child repeats the history of the 
race, and that, from the larger historic standpoint, 
writing as a mode of utterance is only the latest fashion. 

Of course the pupils must write, and write well, just as they must 
read, and read much; but that English suffers from insisting upon 
this double long circuit too early and cultivates it to excess, de- 
vitalizes school language and makes it a little unreal, like other 
affectations of adult ways, so that on escaping from its thraldom the 
child and youth slump back to the language of the street as never 
before. This is a false application of the principle of learning to do 
by doing. The young do not learn to write by writing, but by read- 
ing and hearing. To become a good writer one must read, feel, 
think, experience, until he has something to say that others want to 
hear. The golden age of French literature, as Gaston Deschamps 
and Brunetiere have lately told us, was that of the salon, when con- 
versation dominated letters, set fashions, and made the charm of 
French style. Its lowest ebb was when bookishness led and people 
began to talk as they wrote. 

IV. The fourth cause of degeneration of school 
English is the growing preponderance of concrete words 
for designating things of sense and physical acts, over 
the higher element of language that names and deals 
with concepts, ideas, and non-material things. The 
object-lesson came in as a reaction against the danger 
of merely verbal and definition Imowledge and word 
memory. Now it has gone so far that not only things 
but even languages, vernacular and foreign, are taught 
by appeals to the eye. More lately, elementary science 
has introduced another area of pictures and things 

248 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

while industrial education has still further greatly en- 
larged the material sensori-motor element of training. 
Geography is taught with artifacts, globes, maps, sand 
boxes, drawing. Lliss IMargaret Smith ^ counted two 
hundred and eighty objects that must be distributed and 
gathered for forty pupils in a single art lesson. Instruc- 
tion, moreover, is more and more busied upon parts and 
details rather than wholes, upon analysis rather than 
synthesis. Thus in modern pedagogy there is an in- 
creased tyranny of things, a growing neglect or ex- 
clusion of all that is unseen. 

The first result of this is that the modern school 
child is more and more mentally helpless without ob- 
jects of sense. Conversation is increasingly concrete, if 
not of material things and persons present in time and 
even place. Instead of dealing with thoughts and 
ideas, speech and writing is close to sense and the words 
used are names for images and acts. But there is 
another higher part of language that is not so abjectly 
tied down to perception, but that lives, moves, and has 
its being in the field of concepts rather than percepts, 
which, to use Earle's distinction, is symbolic and not 
presentative, that describes thinking that is not mere 
contiguity in space or sequence in time but that is 
best in the far higher and more mental associations of 
likeness, that is more remote from activity, that, to use 
logical terminology, is connotative and not merely de- 
notative, that has extension as well as intension, that 
requires abstraction and generalization. Without this 
latter element higher mental development is lacking 
because this means more than word-painting the ma- 
terial world. 

1 The Psychological and Pedagogical Aspect of Language. Peda- 
gogical Seminary, December, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 438-458. 

249 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

Our school youth to-day suffer from just this defect. 
If their psychic operations can be called thought it is 
of that elementary and half animal kind that consists 
in imagery. Their talk with each other is of things 
of present and immediate interest. They lack even the 
elements of imagination, which makes new combinations 
and is creative, because they are dominated by mental 
pictures of the sensory. Large views that take them 
afield away from the persons and things and acts they 
know do not appeal to them. Attempts to think rigor- 
ously are too hard. The teacher feels that all the 
content of mind must come in through the senses, and 
that if these are well fed, inferences and generalizations 
will come of themselves later. ]\Iany pupils have never 
in their lives talked five minutes before others on any 
subject whatever that can properly be called intel- 
lectual. It irks them to occupy themselves with purely 
mental processes, so enslaved are they by what is near 
and personal, and thus they are impoverished in the 
best elements of language. It is as if what are some- 
times called the associative fibers, both ends of which 
are in the brain, were dwarfed in comparison with the 
afferent and efferent fibers that mediate sense and mo- 
tion. 

That the soul of language as an instrument of 
thought consists in this non-presentative element, so 
often lacking, is conclusively shown in the facts of 
speech diseases. In the slowly progressive aphasias, 
of late so carefully studied, the words first lost are those 
of things and acts most familiar to the patient, while 
the words that persist longest in the wreckage of the 
speech-centers are generally words that do not designate 
the things of sense. A tailor loses the power to name 
his chalk, measure, shears, although he can long talk 

250 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

fluently of what little lie may chance to know of God, 
beauty, truth, virtue, happiness, prosperity, etc. The 
farmer is unable to name the cattle in his yard or his 
own occupations, although he can reason as well as ever 
about politics; can not discuss coin or bills, but can 
talk of financial policies and securities, or about health 
and wealth generally. The reason is obvious. It is 
because concrete thinking has two forms, the word and 
the image, and the latter so tends to take the place of 
the former that it can be lost to both sense and articu- 
lation without great impairment, whereas conceptual 
thinking lacks imagery and depends upon words alone, 
and hence these must persist because they have no 
alternate form which vi<3ariates for them. 

In its lower stages, speech is necessarily closely bound 
up with the concrete world; but its real glory appears 
in its later stages and its higher forms, because there 
the soul takes flight in the intellectual world, learns to 
live amidst its more spiritual realities, to put names 
to thoughts, which is far higher than to put names to 
things. It is in this world that the best things in the 
best books live; and the modern school-bred distaste for 
them, the low-ranged mental action that hovers near the 
coastline of matter and can not launch out with zest 
into the open sea of thoughts, holding communion with 
the great dead of the past or the great living of the 
distant present, seems almost like a slow progressive 
abandonment of the high attribute of speech and the 
lapse toward infantile or animal picture-thinking. If 
the school is slowly becoming speechless in this sense, 
if it is lapsing in all departments toward busy work 
and losing silence, repose, the power of logical thought, 
and even that of meditation, which is the muse of 
originality, this is perhaps the gravest of all these types 

251 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

of decay. If the child has no resources in solitude, can 
not think without the visual provocation, is losing sub- 
jective life, enthusiasm for public, social, ethical ques- 
tions, is crippled for intellectual pursuits, cares only 
in a languid way for literary prose and poetry, re- 
sponds only to sensuous stimuli and events at short 
range, and is indifferent to all wide relations and moral 
responsibility, cares only for commercial self-interest, 
the tactics of field sport, laboratory occupations and 
things which can be illustrated from a pedagogic mu- 
seum, then the school is dwarfing, in dawning maturity, 
the higher powers that belong to this stage of develop- 
ment and is responsible for mental arrest. 

In this deplorable condition, if we turn to the child 
study of speech for help, we find that, although it has 
been chiefly occupied with infant vocabularies, there are 
already a very few and confessedly crude and feeble 
beginnings, but even these shed more light on the lost 
pathway than all other sources combined. The child 
once set in their midst again corrects the wise men. 
We will first briefly recapitulate these and then state 
and apply their lessons. 

Miss Williams ^ found that out of 253 young ladies only 133 did 
not have favorite sounds, a and a leading among the vowels, and I, 
r, and m among the consonants. Eighty-five had favorite words 
often lugged in, 329 being good. Two hundred and twenty-one, as 
children, had favorite proper names in geography, and also for boys, 
but especially for girls. The order of a few of the latter is as follows : 
Helen, 36; Bessie, 25; Violet and Lilly, 20; Elsie and Beatrice, 18; 
Dorothy and Alice, 17; Ethel, 15; Myrtle, 14; Mabel, Marguerite, 
Pearl, and Rose, 13; May, 12; Margaret, Daisy, and Grace, 11; Ruth 
and Florence, 9; Gladys, 8; Maud, Nellie, and Gertrude, 7; Blanche 
and Mary, 6; Eveline and Pansy, 5; Belle, Beulah, Constance, Eleanor, 



1 Children's Interest in Words. Pedagogical Seminary, September, 
1902, vol. 9, pp. 274-295. 

252 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

Elizabeth, Eva, Laura, Lulu, Pauline, Virginia, and Vivian, 4 each, 
etc. 

Of ten words found interesting to adolescents, murmur was the 
favorite, most enjoying its sound. Lullaby, supreme, annannaman- 
nannaharoumlemay, immemorial, lillibulero, burbled, and incarn- 
adine were liked by most, while zigzag and shigsback were not liked. 
This writer says that adolescence is marked by some increased love 
of words for motor activity and in interest in words as things in them- 
selves, but shows a still greater rise of interest in new words and 
pronunciations; "above all, there is a tremendous rise in interest in 
words as instruments of thought." The flood of new experiences, 
feelings, and views finds the old vocabulary inadequate, hence "the 
dumb, bound feeling of which most adolescents at one time or another 
complain, and also I suspect from this study in the case of girls, we 
have an explanation of the rise of interest in slang." "The second 
idea suggested by our study is the tremendous importance of hear- 
ing in the affective side of language." 

Conradi ^ found that of 273 returns concerning children's pleasure 
in knowing or using new words, ninety-two per cent were affirmative, 
eight per cent negative, and fifty per cent gave words especially 
"liked." Some were partial to big words, some for those with z 
in them. Some found most pleasure in saying them to themselves 
and some in using them with others. In all there were nearly three 
hundred such words, very few of which w^ere artificial. As to words 
pretty or queer in form or sound, his list was nearly as large, but 
the greater part of the words were different. Sixty per cent of all 
had had periods of spontaneously trying to select their vocabulary 
by making lists, studying the dictionary, etc. The age of those who 
did so would seem to average not far from early puberty, but the 
data are too meager for conclusion. A few started to go through 
the dictionary, some wished to astonish their companions or used 
large new w^ords to themselves or their dolls. Seventy per cent had 
had a passion for affecting foreign words when English would do 
as well. Conradi says "the age varies from twelve to eighteen, most 
being fourteen to sixteen." Some indulge this tendency in letters, 
and would like to do so in conversation, but fear ridicule. Fifty-six 
per cent reported cases of superfine elegance or affected primness or 
precision in the use of words. Some had spells of effort in this 
direction, some belabor compositions to get a style that suits them, 
some memorize fine passages to this end, or modulate their voices to 

1 Children's Interests in Words, Slang, Stories, etc. Pedagogical 
Seminary, October, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 359-404. 

253 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

aid them, affect elegance with a chosen mate by agreement, soliloquize 
before a glass with poses. According to his curve this tendency 
culminates at fourteen. 

Adjectivism, adverbism, and nounism, or marked disposition to 
multiply one or more of the above classes of words, and in the above 
order, also occur near the early teens. Adjectives are often used as 
adverbial prefixes to other adjectives, and here favorite words are 
marked. Nearly half of Conradi's reports show it, but the list of 
words so used is small. 

Miss Williams presents an interesting curve of slang confessed as 
being both attractive and used by 226 out of 251. From this it ap- 



40 
30 
30 
10 










/ 


s. 
























/ 


s 

/ 


\ 
\ 


\ 


















h 


— 


/ 


\ 


\ 


\ 


\ 














fj 


*», 


,/ 


** 


\ 

\ 




\ 










/- 


y 


/ 












\ 


\ 




\ 


Age 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 IG 17 18 19 20 



Slang 

Reading Ci-aze 
Pi-ecision 



pears that early adolescence is the curve of greatest pleasure in its 
use, fourteen being the culminating year. There is very little until 
eleven, when the curve for girls rises very rapidly, to fall nearly as 
rapidly from fifteen to seventeen. Ninety-three out of 104 who used 
it did so despite criticism. 

Conradi, who collected and prints a long list of current slang words 
and phrases, found that of 295 young boys and girls not one failed to 
confess their use, and eighty-five per cent of all gave the age at which 
they thought it most common. On this basis he constructs the above 
curve, comparing with this the curve of a craze for reading and for 
precision in speech. 

The reasons given are, in order of frequency, that slang was more 
254 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

emphatic, more exact, more concise, convenient, sounded pretty, re- 
lieved formality, was natural, manly, appropriate, etc. Only a very 
few thought it was vulgar, limited the vocabulary, led to or was a 
substitute for swearing, destroyed exactness, etc. This writer at- 
tempts a provisional classification of slang expressions under the sug- 
gestive heads of rebukes to pride, boasting and loquacity, hypocrisy, 
quaint and emphatic negatives, exaggerations, exclamations, mild 
oaths, attending to one's own business and not meddling or interfer- 
ing, names for money, absurdity, neurotic effects of surprise or shock, 
honesty and lying, getting confused, fine appearance and dress, words 
for intoxication which Partridge has collected, ^ for anger collated by 
Chamberlain, 2 crudeness or innocent naivete, love and sentimentality, 
etc. Slang is also rich in describing conflicts of all kinds, praising 
courage, censuring inquisitiveness, and as a school of moral discipline, 
but he finds, however, a very large number unclassified; and while he 
maintains throughout a distinction between that used by boys and 
by girls, sex differences are not very marked. The great majority 
of terms are mentioned but once, and a few under nearly all of the 
above heads have great numerical precedence. A somewhat striking 
fact is the manifold variations of a pet typical form. Twenty-three 

shock expletives, e. g., are, ''Wouldn't that you?" the blank 

being filled by jar, choke, cook, rattle, scorch, get, start, etc., or 
instead of you adjectives are devised. Feeling is so intense and 
massive, and psychic processes are so rapid, forcible, and undeveloped 
that the pithiness of some of these expressions makes them brilliant 
and creative works of genius, and after securing an apprenticeship 
are sure of adoption. Their very lawlessness helps to keep speech 
from rigidity and desiccation, and they hit off nearly every essential 
phrase of adolescent life and experience. 

Conventional modes of speech do not satisfy the adolescent, so 
that he is often either reticent or slangy. Walt Whitman^ says that 
slang is "an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literal- 
ism and to express itself inimitably, which in the highest walks pro- 
duces poets and poems"; and again, " Daring as it is to say so, in the 
growth of language it is certain that the retrospect of slang from the 
start would be the recalling from their nebulous condition of all that 
is poetical in the stores of human utterance." Lowell* says, "There 



1 American Journal of Psychology, April, 1900, vol. 11, p. 345 et seq. 

2 American Journal of Psychology, January, 1895, vol. 6, pp. 585- 
592. See also vol. 10, p. 517 et seq. 

3 North American Review, November, 1885, vol. 141, pp. 431-435. 
* Introduction to the Biglow Papers, series ii. 

255 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

is death in the dictionary, and where language is too strictly limited 
by convention, the ground for expression to grow in is limited also, 
and we get a potted literature, Chinese dwarfs instead of healthy 
trees." Lounsbury asserts that ''slang is an effort on the part of 
the users of language to say something more vividly, strongly, con- 
cisely than the language existing permits it to be said. It is the 
source from which the decaying energies of speech are constantly re- 
freshed." Conradi adds in substance that weak or vicious slang is too 
feeble to survive, and what is vital enough to live fills a need. The 
final authority is the people, and it is better to teach youth to dis- 
criminate between good and bad slang rather than to forbid it en- 
tirely. Emerson calls it language in the making, its crude, vital, 
raw material. It is often an effective school of moral description, 
a palliative for profanity, and expresses the natural craving for 
superlatives. Faults are hit off and condemned with the curtness 
and sententiousness of proverbs devised by youth to sanctify itself 
and correct its own faults. The pedagogue objects that it violates 
good form and established usage, but why should the habits of 
hundreds of years ago control when they can not satisfy the needs of 
youth, which requires a lingua franca of its own, often called ''slan- 
guage"? Most high school and college youth of both sexes have two 
distinct styles, that of the classroom which is as unnatural as the 
etiquette of a royal drawing-room reception or a formal call, and the 
other, that of their own breezy, free, natural life. Often these two 
have no relation to or effect upon each other, and often the latter 
is at times put by with good resolves to speak as purely and therefore 
as self-consciously as they know, with petty fines for every slang 
expression. But very few, and these generally husky boys, boldly 
try to assert their own rude but vigorous vernacular in the field of 
school requirements. 



These simple studies in this vast field demonstrate 
little or nothing, but they suggest very much. Slang 
commonly expresses a moral judgment and falls into 
ethical categories. It usually concerns ideas, sentiment, 
and will, has a psychic content, and is never, like the 
language of the school, a mere picture of objects of 
sense or a description of acts. To restate it in correct 
English would be a course in ethics, courtesy, taste, 
logical predication and opposition, honesty, self-pos- 

256 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

session, modesty, and just the ideal and non-presentative 
mental content that youth most needs, and which the sen- 
suous presentation methods of teaching have neglected. 
Those who see in speech nothing but form condemn 
it because it is vulgar. Youth has been left to meet 
these high needs alone, and the prevalence of these 
crude, forms is an indictment of the delinquency of 
pedagogues in not teaching their pupils to develop 
and use their intellect properly. Their pith and meati- 
ness are a standing illustration of the need of con- 
densation for intellectual objects that later growth 
analyzes. These expressions also illustrate the law that 
the higher and larger the spiritual content, the grosser 
must be the illustration in which it is first couched. 
Further studies now in progress will, I believe, make 
this still clearer. 

Again, we see in the above, outcrops of the strong 
pubescent instinct to enlarge the vocabulary in two 
ways. One is to affect foreign equivalents. This at first 
suggests an appetency for another language like the dog- 
Latin gibberish of children. It is one of the motives 
that prompts many to study Latin or French, but it 
has little depth, for it turns out, on closer study, to be 
only the affectation of superiority and the love of mys- 
tifying others. The other is a very different impulse 
to widen the vernacular. To pause to learn several 
foreign equivalents of things of sense may be anti- 
educational if it limits the expansion of thought in 
our own tongue. The two are, in fact, often inversely 
related to each other. In giving a foreign sjmonym when 
the mind seeks a new native word, the pedagogue does 
not deal fairly. In this irradiation into the mother 
tongue, sometimes experience with the sentiment or feel- 
ing, act, fact, or object precedes, and then a name for it 

257 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

is demanded, or conversely the sound, size, oddness or 
jingle of the word is first attractive and the meaning 
comes later. The latter needs the recognition and 
utilization which the former already has. Lists of fa- 
vorite words should be wrought out for spelling and 
writing and their meanings illustrated, for these have 
often the charm of novelty as on the frontier of Imowl- 
edge and enlarge the mental horizon like new discoveries. 
We must not starve this voracious new appetite '' for 
words as instruments of thought." 

Interest in story-telling rises till twelve or thirteen, 
and thereafter falls off perhaps rather suddenly, partly 
because youth is now more interested in receiving than in 
giving. As in the drawing curve we saw a characteristic 
age when the child loses pleasure in creating as its power 
of appreciating pictures rapidly arises, so now, as the 
reading curve rises, auditory receptivity makes way for 
the visual method shown in the rise of the reading curve 
with augmented zest for book-method of acquisition. 
Darkness or twilight enhances the story interest in chil- 
dren, for it eliminates the distraction of sense and encour- 
ages the imagination to unfold its pinions, but the youth- 
ful fancy is less bat-like and can take its boldest flights 
in broad daylight. A camp-fire, or an open hearth with 
tales of animals, ghosts, heroism, and adventure can teach 
virtue, and vocabulary, style, and substance in their 
native unity. 

The pubescent reading passion is partly the cause and 
partly an effect of the new zest in and docility to the 
adult world and also of the fact that the receptive are 
now and here so immeasurably in advance of the creative 
powers. Now the individual transcends his own ex- 
perience and learns to profit by that of others. There is 
now evolved a penumbral region in the soul more or less 

258 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

beyond the reach of all school methods, a world of 
glimpses and hints, and the work here is that of the pros- 
pector and not of the careful miner. It is the age of skip- 
ping and sampling, of pressing the keys lightly. What 
is acquired is not examinable but only suggestive. Per- 
haps nothing read now fails to leave its mark. It can 
not be orally reproduced at call, but on emergency it is 
at hand for use. As Augustine said of God, so the child 
might say of most of his mental content in these psychic 
areas, ' ' If you ask me, I do not know ; but if you do not 
ask me, I know very well " — a case analogous to the 
typical girl who exclaimed to her teacher, '' I can do 
and understand this perfectly if you only won't ex- 
plain it." That is why examinations in English, if not 
impossible, as Goldwin Smith and Oxford hold, are very 
liable to be harmful, and recitations and critical notes an 
impertinence, and always in danger of causing arrest 
of this exquisite romantic function in which literature 
comes in the closest relation to life, keeping the heart 
warm, reenforcing all its good motives, preforming 
choices, and universalizing its sympathies. 

R. W. Bullock^ classified and tabulated 2,000 returns from school- 
children from the third to the twelfth grade, both inclusive, concern- 
ing their reading. From this it appeared that the average boy of the 
third grade "read 4.9 books in six months; that the average falls to 
3.6 in the fourth and fifth grades and rises to a maximum of 6.5 in 
the seventh grade, then drops quite regularly to 3 in the twelfth 
grade at the end of the high school course." The independent tabu- 
lation of returns from other cities showed little variation. "Grade 
for grade, the girls read more than the boys, and as a rule they reach 
their maximum a year sooner, and from a general maximum of 5.9 
books there is a drop to 3.3 at the end of the course." The age of 
maximum reading may be postponed or accelerated perhaps nearly 
a year by the absence or presence of library facilities. Tabulating the 

1 Some Observations on Children's Reading. Proceedings of the 
National Educational Association, 1897, pp. 1015-1021. 

259 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

short stories read per week, it was found that these averaged 2.1 in 
the third grade, rose to 7.7 per week in the seventh grade, and in the 
twelfth had fallen to 2.3, showing the same general tendency. 

The percentage tables for boys' preference for eight classes of 
stories are here only suggestive. "War stories seem popular with 
third grade boys, and that liking seems well marked through the 
sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. Stories of adventure are popular 
all through the heroic period, reaching their maximum in the eighth 
and ninth grades. The liking for biography and travel or explora- 
tion grows gradually to a climax in the ninth grade, and remains well 
up through the course. The tender sentiment has little charm for the 
average grade boy, and only in the high school course does he ac- 
knowledge any considerable use of love stories. In the sixth grade 
he is fond of detective stories, but they lose their charm for him as 
he grows older." For girls, "stories of adventure are popular in the 
sixth grade, and stories of travel are always enjoyed. The girl likes 
biography, but in the high school, true to her sex, she prefers stories 
of great women rather than great men, but because she can not get 
them reads those of men. Pity it is that the biographies of so few 
of the world's many great women are written. The taste for love 
stories increases steadily to the end of the high school course. Beyond^ 
that we have no record." Thus "the maximum am'- unt of reading 
is done in every instance between the sixth and eighth grades, the 
average being in the seventh grade at an average age of fourteen and 
one-tenth years." Seventy-five per cent of all discuss their reading 
with some one, and the writer urges that "when ninety-five per cent 
of the boys prefer adventure or seventy-five per cent of the girls 
prefer love stories, that is what they are going to read," and the duty 
of the teacher or librarian is to see that they have both in the highest, 
purest form. 

Henderson ^ found that of 2,989 children from nine to fifteen, 
least books were read at the age of nine and most at the age of fifteen, 
and that there was "a gradual rise in amount throughout, the only 
break being in the case of girls at the age of fourteen and the boys at 
the age of twelve." For fiction the high- water mark was reached 
for both sexes at eleven, and the subsequent fall is far less rapid for 
girls than for boys. "At the age of thirteen the record for travel 
and adventure stands highest in the case of the boys, phenomenally 
so. There is a gradual rise in history with age, and a corresponding 
decline in fiction." 

1 Report on Child Reading. New York Report of State Superin- 
tendent, 1897, vol. 2, p. 979. 

260 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

Kirkpatrick^ classified returns from 5,000 children from the fourth 
to the ninth grade in answer to questions that concerned their read- 
ing. He found a sudden increase in the sixth grade, when children 
are about twelve, when there is often a veritable reading craze. 
Dolls are abandoned and " plays, games, and companionship of others 
are less attractive, and the reading hunger in many children becomes 
insatiable and is often quite indiscriminate." It seems to "most 
frequently begin at about twelve years of age and continue at least 
three or four years," after which increased home duties, social re- 
sponsibilities, and school requirements reduce it and make it more 
discriminating in quality. "The fact that boys read about twice as 
much history and travel as girls and only about two-thirds as much 
poetry and stories shows beyond question that the emotional and 
intellectual wants of boys and girls are essentially different before 
sexual maturity." 

Miss Vostrovsky ^ found that among 1,269 children there was a 
great increase of taste for reading as shown by the number of books 
taken from the library, which began with a sharp rise at eleven and 
increased steadily to nineteen, when her survey ended; that boys 
read most till seventeen, and then girls took tne precedence. The 
taste for juvenile stories was declining and that for fiction and general 
literature was rapidly increased. At about the sixteenth year a change 
took place in both sexes, "showing then the beginning of a greater 
interest in works of a more general character." Girls read more 
fiction than boys at every age, but the interest in it begins to be very 
decided at adolescence. With girls it appears to come a little earlier 
and with greater suddenness, while the juvenile story maintains a 
strong hold upon boys even after the fifteenth year. The curve of 
decline in juvenile stories is much more pronounced in both sexes 
than the rise of fiction. Through the teens there is a great increase 
in the definiteness of answers to the questions why books were chosen. 
Instead of being read because they were " good" or " nice," they were 
read because recommended, and later because of some special interest. 
Girls relied on recommendations more than boys. The latter were 
more guided by reason and the former by sentiment. Nearly three 
times as many boys in the early teens chose books because they 
were exciting or venturesome. Even the stories which girls called 
exciting were tame compared with those chosen by boys. Girls chose 

1 Children's Reading. North-Western Monthly, December, 1898, 
vol. 9, pp. 188-191, and January, 1899, vol. 9, pp. 229-233. 

2 A Study of Children's Reading Tastes. Pedagogical Seminary, 
December, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 523-535. 

261 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

books more than four times as often because of children in them, and 
more often because they were funny. Boys care very httle for style, 
but must have incidents and heroes. The author says " the special 
interest that girls have in fiction begins about the age of adolescence. 
After the sixteenth year the extreme delight in stories fades," or 
school demands become more imperative and uniform. Girls pre- 
fer domestic stories and those with characters like themselves and 
scenes more like those with which they are familiar. "No boy 
confesses to a purely girl's story, while girls frankly do to an inter- 
esting story about boys. Women writers seem to appeal more to 
girls, men writers to boys. Hence, the authors named by each sex 
are almost entirely different. In fiction more standard works were 
drawn by boys than by girls." ''When left to develop according to 
chance, the tendency is often toward a selection of books which unfit 
one for every-day living, either by presenting, on the one hand, too 
many scenes of delicious excitement or, on the other, by narrowing 
the vision to the wider possibilities of life." 

Out of 523 full answers, Lancaster found that 453 "had what 
might be called a craze for reading at some time in the adolescent 
period," and thinks parents little realize the intensity of the desire to 
read or how this nascent period is the golden age to cultivate taste 
and inoculate against reading what is bad. The curve rises rapidly 
from eleven to fourteen, culminates at fifteen, after which it falls 
rapidly. Some become omnivorous readers of everything in their 
way; others are profoundly, and perhaps for life, impressed with some 
single book; others have now crazes for history, now for novels, now 
for dramas or for poetry; some devour encyclopedias; some imagine 
themselves destined to be great novelists and compose long romances ; 
some can give the dates with accuracy of the different periods of the 
development of their tastes from the fairy tales of early childhood 
to the travels and adventures of boyhood and then to romance, 
poetry, history, etc.; and some give the order of their development 
of taste for the great poets. 

The careful statistics of Dr. Reyer show that the greatest greed 
of reading is from the age of fifteen to twenty-two, and is on the 
average greatest of all at twenty. He finds that ten per cent of the 
young people of this age do forty per cent of all the reading. Before 
twenty the curve ascends very rapidly, to fall afterward yet more 
rapidly as the need of bread-winning becomes imperative. After 
thirty-five the great public reads but little. Every youth should 
have his or her own library, which, however small, should be select. 
To seal some knowledge of their content with the delightful sense of 
ownership helps to preserve the apparatus of culture, keeps green 

262 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

early memories, or makes one of the best of tangible mementoes of 
parental care and love. For the young especially, the only ark of 
safety in the dark and rapidly rising flood of printer's ink is to turn 
resolutely away from the ideal of quantity to that of quality. While 
literature rescues youth from individual limitations and enables it 
to act and think more as spectators of all time, and sharers of all 
existence, the passion for reading may be excessive, and books which 
from the silent alcoves of our nearly 5,500 American libraries rule the 
world more now than ever before, may cause the young to neglect 
the oracles within, weaken them by too wide reading, make conver- 
sation bookish, and overwhelm spontaneity and originality with a 
superfetation of alien ideas. 

The reading passion may rage with great intensity 
when the soul takes its first long flight in the world of 
books, and ninety per cent of all Conradi's cases showed 
it. Of these, thirty-two per cent read to have the feel- 
ings stirred and the desire of knowledge was a far less 
frequent motive. Some read to pass idle time, others to 
appear learned or to acquire a style or a vocabulary. 
Romance led. Some specialized, and w^ith some the ap- 
petite was omnivorous. Some preferred books about or 
addressed to children, some fairy tales, and some sought 
only those for adults. The night is often invaded and 
some become ' ' perfectly wild ' ' over exciting adventures 
or the dangers and hardships of true lovers, laughing and 
crying as the story turns from grave to gay, and a few 
read several books a week. Some were forbidden and 
read by stealth alone, or with books hidden in their desks 
or under school books. Some few live thus for years in 
an atmosphere highly charged with romance, and burn 
out their fires wickedly early with a sudden and ex- 
treme expansiveness that makes life about them uninter- 
esting and unreal, and that reacts to commonplace later. 
Conradi prints some two or three hundred favorite books 
and authors of early and of later adolescence. The 
natural reading of early youth is not classic nor blighted 
18 263 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

by compulsion or uniformity for all. This age seeks to 
express originality and personality in individual choices 
and tastes. 

Suggestive and briefly descriptive lists of best books 
and authors by authorities in different fields on which 
some time is spent in making selection, talks about books, 
pooling knowledge of them, with no course of reading 
even advised and much less prescribed, is the best guid- 
ance for developing the habit of rapid cursory reading. 
Others before Professor De Long, of Colorado, have held 
that the power of reading a page in a moment, as a 
mathematician sums up a column of figures, and as the 
artist Dore was able to read a book by turning the leaves, 
can be attained by training and practise. School pres- 
sure should not suppress this instinct of omnivorous read- 
ing, which at this age sometimes prompts the resolve to 
read encyclopedias, and even libraries, or to sample every- 
thing to be found in books at home. Along with, but 
never suppressing, it there should be some stated reading, 
but this should lay down only kinds of reading like 
the four emphasized in the last chapter or offer a goodly 
number of large alternative groups of books and authors, 
like the five of the Leland Stanford University, and per- 
mit wide liberty of choice to both teacher and pupil. 
Few triumphs of the uniformitarians, who sacrifice in- 
dividual needs to mechanical convenience in dealing with 
youth in masses, have been so sad as marking off and 
standardizing a definite quantum of requirements here. 
Instead of irrigating a wide field, the well-springs of liter- 
ary interest are forced to cut a deep canyon and leave 
wide desert plains of ignorance on either side. Besides 
imitation, which reads what others do, is the desire to 
read something no one else does, and this is a palladium 
of individuality. Bad as is the principle, the selections 

264 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

are worse, including the saeeharinity ineffable of Tenny- 
son 's Princess (a strange expression of the progressive 
feminization of the high school and yet satirizing the 
scholastic aspiration of girls) which the virile boy abhors, 
books about books which are two removes from life, and 
ponderous Latinity authors which for the Saxon boy sug- 
gest David fighting in Saul 's armor, and which warp and 
pervert the nascent sentence-sense on a foreign model. 
Worst of all, the prime moral purpose of youthful read- 
ing is ignored in choices based on form and style; and 
a growing profusion of notes that distract from content 
to language, the study of which belongs in the college if 
not in the university, develops the tendencies of criticism 
before the higher powers of sympathetic appreciation 
have done their work.^ 



* Perhaps the best and most notable school reader is Das Deutsche 
Lesebuch, begun nearly fifty years ago by Hopf and Paulsiek, and lately 
rupplemented by a corps of writers headed by Dobeln, all in ten volumes 
of over 3,500 pages and containing nearly six times as much matter as 
the largest American series. Many men for years went over the history 
of German literature, from the Eddas and Nibelungenlied down, including 
a few living writers, carefully selecting saga, legends, Mdrchen, fables, 
proverbs, hjonns, a few prayers, Bible tales, conundrums, jests, and 
humorous tales, with many digests, epitomes and condensation of great 
standards, quotations, epic, lyric, dramatic poetry, adventure, explora- 
tion, biography, with sketches of the life of each writer quoted, with a 
large final volume on the history of German literature. All this, it is 
explained, is "statarie" or required to be read between Octava^ and 
Obersecunda. It is no aimless anthology or chrestomathy like Chambers's 
Encyclopedia, but it is perhaps the best product of prolonged concerted 
study to select from a vast field the best to feed each nascent stage of 
later childhood and early youth, and to secure the maximum of pleasure 
and profit. The ethical end is dominant throughout this pedagogic 
canon. 

1 The Prussian gj^mnasium, whose course is classical and fits for the 
University, has nine classes in three divisions of three classes each. The 
lower classes are Octava, Septa, Sexta, Quinta, and Quarta; the middle 
classes, Untertertia, Obertertia, and Untersecunda; the higher classes, 
Obersecunda, Unterprima, and Oberprima. Pupils must be at least nine 
years of age and have done three years preparatory work before entrance. 

265 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

{B) Other new mental powers and aptitudes are as 
yet too little studied. Very slight are the observations 
so far made of children's historic, which is so clearly 
akin to literary, interest and capacity. With regard to 
this and several other subjects in the curriculum we are 
in the state of Watts when he gazed at the tea-kettle and 
began to dream of the steam-engine ; we are just recog- 
nizing a new power and method destined to reconstruct 
and increase the efficiency of education, but only after a 
long and toilsome period of limited successes. 

Mrs. Barnes ^ told a story without date, place, name, or moral, 
and compared the questions which 1,250 children would like to have 
answered about it. She found that the interest of girls in persons, 
or the number who asked the question "who," culminated at twelve, 
when it coincided with that of boys, but that the latter continued to 
rise to fifteen. The interest to know "place where" events occurred 
culminated at eleven with girls, and at fifteen, and at a far higher 
point, with boys. The questions "how" and "why," calling for the 
method and reason, both culminated at twelve for girls and fifteen 
for boys, but were more infrequent and showed less age differences 
than the preceding question. Interest in results of the action was 
most pronounced of all, culminating at twelve in girls and fifteen in 
boys. Details and time excited far less interest, the former jointly 
culminating for both sexes at eleven. Interest in the truth of the 
narrative was extremely slight, although it became manifest at 
fifteen, and was growing at sixteen. The number of inferences drawn 
steadily increased with age, although the increase was very slight 
after thirteen. Both legitimate and critical inferences increased after 
eleven, while imaginative inferences at that age had nearly reached 
their maximum. Interest in names was very strong throughout, as 
in primitive people. Boys were more curious concerning "who," 
"where," and "how"; girls as to "why." In general, the historic 
curiosity of boys was greater than that of girls, and culminated later. 
The inferences drawn from an imagined finding of a log-house, boat, 
and arrows on a lonely island indicate that the power of inference, 
both legitimate and imaginative, develops strongly at twelve and 

1 The Historic Sense among Children. In her Studies in Historical 
Method. D. C. Heath and Co., Boston, 1896, p. 57. 

266 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

thirteen, after which doubt and the critical faculties are appaient; 
which coincides with Mr. M. A. Tucker's conclusion, that doubt 
develops at thirteen and that personal inference diminishes about 
that age. 

The children were given two accounts of the fall of Fort Sumter, 
one in the terms of a school history and the other a despatch of equal 
length from Major Anderson, and asked which was best, should be 
kept, and why. Choice of the narrative steadily declined after eleven 
and that of the despatch increased, the former reaching its lowest, 
the latter its highest, point at fifteen, indicating a preference for the 
first-hand record. The number of those whose choice was affected 
by style showed no great change from twelve to fifteen, but rose very 
rapidly for the next two years. Those who chose the despatch be- 
cause it was true, signed, etc., increased rapidly in girls and boys 
throughout the teens, and the preference for the telegram as a more 
direct source increased very rapidly from thirteen to seventeen. 

Other studies of this kind led Mrs. Barnes to conclude that 
children remembered items by groups; that whole groups were often 
omitted; that those containing most action were best remembered; 
that what is remembered is remembered with great accuracy; that 
generalities are often made more specific; that the number of details 
a child carries away from a connected narrative is not much above 
f fty, so that their numbers should be limited; and from it all was 
inferred the necessity of accuracy, of massing details about central 
characters or incidents, letting action dominate, omitting all that is 
aside from the main line of the story, of bringing out cause and 
effect, and dramatizing where possible. 

Miss Patterson ^ collated the answers of 2,237 children to the 
question "What does 1895 mean?" The blanks "Don't know" 
decreased very rapidly from six to eight, and thereafter maintained a 
slight but constant percentage. Those who expanded the phrase a 
little without intelligence were most numerous from eight to ten, 
while the proportion who gave a correct explanation rose quite 
steadily for both sexes and culminated at fourteen for girls and 
fifteen for boys. The latter only indicates the pupils of real historic 
knowledge. The writer concludes that "the sense of historical time 
is altogther lacking with children of seven, and may be described as 
slight up to the age of twelve." History, it is thought, should be 
introduced early with no difference between boys and girls, but "up 
to the age of twelve or thirteen it should be presented in a series of 

* Special Study on Children's Sense of Historical Time. Mrs. Barnes's 
Studies in Historical Method, D. C. Heath and Co., Boston, 1896, p. 94. 

267 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

striking biographies and events, appearing if possible in contemporary- 
ballads and chronicles, and illustrated by maps, chronologic charts, 
and as richly as possible by pictures of contemporary objects, build- 
ings, and people." At the age of fourteen or fifteen, another sort of 
work should appear. Original sources should still be used, but they 
should illustrate not "the picture of human society moving before 
us in a long panorama, but should give us the opportunity to study 
the organization, thought, feeling, of a time as seen in its concrete 
embodiments, its documents, monuments, men, and books." The 
statesmen, thinkers, poets, should now exceed explorers and fighters; 
reflection and interpretation, discrimination of the true from the 
false, comparison, etc., are now first in order; while later yet, per- 
haps in college, should come severer methods and special mono- 
graphic study. 

Studies of mentality, so well advanced for infants and 
so well begun for lower grades, are still very meager for 
adolescent stages so far as they bear on growth in the 
power to deal with arithmetic, drawing and pictures, 
puzzles, superstitions, collections, attention, reason, etc. 
Enough has been done to show that with authority to col- 
lect data on plans and by methods that can now be 
operated and with aid which should now be appropriated 
by school boards and teachers' associations, incalculable 
pedagogic economy could be secured and the scientific 
and professional character of teaching every topic in 
upper grammar and high school and even in the early 
college grades be greatly enhanced. To enter upon this 
laborious task in every branch of study is perhaps our 
chief present need and duty to our youth in school, 
although individual studies like that of Binet^ belong 
elsewhere. 

(0) The studies of memory up the grades show char- 
acteristic adolescent changes, and some of these results 
are directly usable in school. 

» L'Etude exp6rimentale de I'intelligence. Schleicher Freres, Paris, 
1903. 

268 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

Bolton^ tested the power of 1,500 children to remember and write 
dictated digits, and found, of course, increasing accuracy with the 
older pupils. He also found that the memory span increased with 
age rather than with the growth of intelligence as determined by 
grade. The pupils depended largely upon visualization, and this and 
concentrated attention suggested that growth of memory did not 
necessarily accompany intellectual advancement. Girls generally 
surpassed boys, and as with clicks too rapid to be counted, it was 
found that when the pupils reached the limits of their span, the num- 
ber of digits was overestimated. The power of concentrated and 
prolonged attention was tested. The probability of error for the 
larger number of digits, 7 and 8, decreased in a marked way with the 
development of pubescence, at least up to fourteen years, with the 
suggestion of a slight rise again at fifteen. 

In comprehensive tests of the ability of Chicago children to re- 
member figures seen, heard, or repeated by them, it was found that, 
from seven to nine, auditory were slightly better remembered than 
visual impressions. From that age the latter steadily increased over 
the former. After thirteen, auditory memory increased but little, 
and was already about ten per cent behind visual, which continued to 
increase at least till seventeen. Audio-visual memory was better 
than either alone, and the span of even this was improved when 
articulatory memory was added. When the tests were made upon 
pupils of the same age in different grades it was found in Chicago that 
memory power, whether tested by sight, hearing, or articulation, 
was best in those pupils whose school standing was highest, and 
least where standing was lowest. 

When a series of digits was immediately repeated orally and a 
record made, it was found ^ that while from the age of eight to twelve 
the memory span increased only eight points, from fourteen to 
eighteen it increased thirteen points. The number of correct repro- 
ductions of numbers of seven places increased during the teens, al- 
though this class of children remain about one digit behind normal 
children of corresponding age. In general, though not without ex- 
ceptions, it was found that intelligence grew with memory span, 
although the former is far more inferior to that of the normal child 
than the latter, and also that weakness of this kind of memory is not 
an especially prominent factor of weak-mindedness. 

1 The Growth of Memory in School Children. American Journal of 
Psychology, April, 1892, vol. 4, pp. 362-380. 

2 Contribution to the Psychology and Pedagogy of Feeble-minded 
Children. By G. E. Johnson. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1895, 
vol. 3, p. 270. 

269 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

Shaw ' tested memory in 700 school children by dividing a story 
of 324 words into 152 phrases, having it read and immediately repro- 
duced by them, and selecting alternate grades from the third grammar 
to the end of the high school, with a few college students. The 
maximum power of this kind of memory was attained by boys in the 
high school period. Girls remembered forty-three per cent in the 
seventh grade, and in the high school forty-seven per cent. The in- 
crease by two-year periods was most rapid between the third and 
fifth grades. Four terms were remembered on the average by at 
least ninety per cent of the pupils, 41 by fifty per cent, and 130 by 
ten per cent. The story written out in the terms remembered by 
each percentage from ten to ninety affords a most interesting picture 
of the growth of memory, and even its errors of omission, insertion, 
substitution and displacement. ''The growth of memory is more 
rapid in the case of girls than boys, and the figures suggest a co- 
incidence with the general law, that the rapid development incident 
to puberty occurs earlier in girls than in boys." 

In a careful study of children's memory, Kemsies^ concludes that 
the quality of memory improves with age more rapidly than the 
quantity. 

W. G. Monroe tested 275 boys and 293 girls, well distributed, from 
seven to seventeen years of age, and found a marked rise for both 
visual and auditory memory at fifteen for both sexes. For both 
sexes, also, auditory memory was best at sixteen and visual at 
fifteen. 

When accuracy in remembering the length of tone was used as a 
test, it was found there was loss from six to seven and gain from 
seven to eight for both sexes. From eight to nine girls lost rapidly 
for one and gained rapidly for the following year, while boys were 
nearly stationary till ten, after which both sexes gained to their maxi- 
mum at fourteen years of age and declined for the two subsequent 
years, both gaining power from sixteen to seventeen, but neither 
attaining the accuracy they had at fourteen.^ 

Netschajeff^ subjected 637 school children, well distributed be- 

1 A Test of Memory in School Children. Pedagogical Seminary, 
October, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 61-78. 

2 Zeitschrift fiir padagogische Psychologie, Pathologic und Hygiene. 
February, 1900. Jalirgang II, Heft 1, pp. 21-30. 

3 See Scripture: Scientific Child Study. Transactions of the lUinois 
Society for Child Study, May, 1895, vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 32-37. 

* Experimentelle Untersuchungen iiber die Gedachtnissentwickelung 
bei Schulkindern. Zeits. f. Psychologie, u. Physiologic dcr Sinnes-organe, 
November, 1900. Bd. 24. Heft 5, pp. 321-351. 

270 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 



11 

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GIRLS 



. Objects 
Sounds 



tween the ages of nine and eighteen, to the following tests. Twelve 
very distinct objects were f?hown them, each for two seconds, which 
must then be im- 
mediately written 
down. Twelve very 
distinct noises were 
made out of sight; 
numbers of two 'fig- 
ures each were read; 
three-syllable words, 
which were names of 
familiar objects, ob- 
jects that suggested 
noises, words desig- 
nating touch, tem- 
perature, and muscle 
sensations, words de- 
scribing states of feel- 
ing, and names of 
abstract ideas also 
were given them. The 
above eight series of 
twelve each were 
all reproduced in 
writing, and showed 
that each kind of 
memory here tested 
increased with age, 
with some slight 
tendency to decline 
at or just before pu- 
berty, then to rise 
and to slightly de- 
cline after the six- 
teenth or seventeenth 
year. Memory for 
objects showed the 
greatest amount of 
increase during the 
year studied, and 
words for feeling next, although at all ages the latter was consid- 
erably below the former. Boys showed stronger memory for real 
impressions, and girls excelled for numbers and words. The differ- 

271 



Numbers 

Visualized Words 



... Sound Concepts 

+++ + + Touch 
— o — „_ Feeling 

r Absti-axjt Ideas 



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BOYS 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

ence of these two kinds of memory was less with girls than with boys. 
The greatest difference between the sexes lay between eleven and 
fourteen years. This seems, at eighteen or nineteen, to be slightly 
increased. '' This is especially great at the age of puberty." Children 
from nine to eleven Have but slight power of reproducing emotions, 
but this increases in the next few years very rapidly, as does that 
of the abstract words. Girls from nine to eleven deal better with 
words than with objects; boys slightly excel with objects. Illusions 
in reproducing words which mistake sense, sound, and rhythm, 
which is not infrequent with younger children, decline with age 
especially at puberty. Up to this period girls are most subject to 
these illusions, and afterward boys. The preceding tables, in which 
the ordinates represent the number of correct reproductions and the 
abscissas the age, are interesting. 

Lobsien made tests similar to those of Netschajeff, ^ with modifi- 
cations for greater accuracy, upon 238 boys and 224 girls from nine 
to fourteen and a half years of age. The preceding tables show the 
development of the various kinds of memory for boys and girls : 



Boys. 



AGE. 


Objects. 


Noises. 


Number. 


Visual 

Concepts. 


Acoustic 
Concepts. 


Touch 
Concepts. 


Feeling 
Concepts. 


Sound!. 


13-1 4i.... 

12-13 

11-12 

10-11 

9-10 


92.56 
76.45 
89.78 
87.12 
64.00 


71.89 
57.33 
57.19 
55.33 
53.33 


80.67 
72.33 
70.22 
49.33 
49.09 


73.00 
69.67 
59.67 
55.11 
46.56 


74.78 
64.89 
63.00 
48.44 
43.78 


75.33 
73.67 
73.33 
57.11 
43.67 


75.44 
58.67 
55.33 
38.33 
27.22 


40.56 
37.67 
19.99 
12.44 
7.22 


Normal \ 
value. 


82.2 


59.02 


64.8 


60.6 


59.4 


64.2 


31.2 


24.0 



13-1 4i.... 

12-13 

11-12 

10-11 

9-10..... 


99.56 
92.89 
94.00 

75.78 
89.33 


82.67 
75.56 
56.00 
46.22 
46.22 


87.22 
74.89 
73.56 
62.44 
50.44 


Girls. 

96.67 
77.22 
72.78 
56.22 
54.22 


71.44 
63.11 
72.11 
54 78 
38.22 


82.00 
74.67 
70 89 
58.78 
51.11 


70.22 
67.33 
73.33 
43.22 
32.89 


41.33 
34.89 
23.22 
10.44 
6.89 




91.4 


62.2 


71.8 


71.0 


60.2 


67.2 


59.4 


23.8 



The table for boys shows in the fourteenth year a marked increase 
of memory for objects, noises, and feelings, especially as compared 
with the marked relative decline the preceding year, when there was 
a decided increase in visual concepts and senseless sounds. The 



See Note 4, p. 270. 

272 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

twelfth year shows the greatest increase in number memory, acoustic 
impressions, touch, and feeUng. The tenth and eleventh years 
show marked increase of memory for objects and their names. Thus 
the increase in the strength of memory is by no means the same year 
by year, but progress focuses on some forms and others are neglected. 
Hence each type of memory shows an almost regular increase and 
decrease in relative strength. 

The table for girls shows a marked increase of all memory forms 
about the twelfth year. This relative increase is exceeded only in 
the fourteenth year for visual concepts. The thirteenth year shows 
the greatest increase for sounds and a remarkable regression for 
objects in passing from the lowest to the next grade above. 

In the accuracy of reproducing the order of impressions, girls 
much exceeded boys at all ages. For seen objects, their accuracy 
was twice that of boys, the boys excelling in order only in num- 
ber. In general, ability to reproduce a series of impressions increases 
and decreases with the power to reproduce in any order, but by no 
means in direct proportion to it. The effect of the last member in 
a series by a purely mechanical reproduction is best in boys. The 
range and energy of reproduction is far higher than ordered sequence. 
In general girls slightly exceed boys in recalling numbers, touch 
concepts, and sounds, and largely exceed in recalling feeling concepts, 
real things and visual concepts. 

Colegrove^ tabulated returns from the early memories of 1,658 
correspondents with 6,069 memories, from which he reached the con- 
clusions, represented in the following curves, for the earliest three 
memories of white males and females. 

In the cuts on the following page, the heavy line represents the 
first memory, the broken the second, and the dotted the third. Age at 
the time of reporting is represented in distance to the right, and the 
age of the person at the time of the occurrence remembered is repre- 
sented by the distance upward. "There is a rise in all the curves at 
adolescence. This shows that, from the age of twelve to fifteen, boys 
do not recall so early memories as they do both before and after this 
period." This Colegrove ascribes to the fact that the present seems 
so large and rich. At any rate, "the earhest memories of boys at 
the age of fourteen average almost four years." His curves for girls 
show that the age of all the first three memories which they are able 
to recall is higher at fourteen than at any period before or after; that 

1 Memory: An Inductive Study. By F. W. Colegrove. Henry Holt 
and Co., New York, 1900, p. 229. See also Individual Memories. Amer- 
ican Journal of Psychology, January, 1899, vol. 10, pp. 228-255. 

273 



YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

at seven and eight the average age of the first things recalled is 
nearly a year earlier than it is at fourteen. This means that at 
puberty there is a marked and characteristic obliteration of infantile 
memories which lapse to oblivion with augmented absorption in the 
present. 

It was found that males have the greatest number of memories 
for protracted or repeated occurrences, for people, and clothing, 
topographical and logical matters; that females have better memories 
for novel occurrences or single impressions. Already at ten and 



BOYS 



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10 11 .13 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 



eleven motor memories begin to decrease for females and increase 
for males. At fourteen and fifteen, motor memories nearly culminate 
for males, but still further decline for females. The former show a 
marked decrease in memory for relatives and playmates and an in- 
crease for other persons. Sickness and accidents to self are remem- 
bered less by males and better by females, as are memories of fears. 
At eighteen and nineteen there is a marked and continued increase in 
the visual memories of each sex and the auditory memory of females. 
Memory for the activity of others increases for both, but far more 
strongly for males. Colegrove concludes from his data that "the 
period of adolescence is one of great psychical awakening. A wide 
range of memories is found at this time. From the fourteenth year 

274 



INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 

with girls and the fifteenth with boys the auditory memories are 
strongly developed. At the dawn of adolescence the motor memory 
of voice nearly culminates, and they have fewer memories of sick- 
ness and accidents to self. During this time the memory of other 
persons and the activity of others is emphasized in case of both 
boys and girls. In general, at this period the special sensory mem- 
ories are numerous, and it is the golden age for motor memories. 
Now, too, the memories of high ideals, self-sacrifice, and self-forget- 
fulness are cherished. Wider interests than self and immediate 
friends become the objects of reflection and recollection." 

After twenty there is a marked change in the memory content. 
The male acquires more and the female less visual and auditory 
memories. The memories of the female are more logical, and topo- 
graphical features increase. Memories of sickness and accidents to 
self decrease with the males and increase with the females, while in 
the case of both there is relative decline in the memories of sickness 
and accident to others. From all this it would appear that different 
memories culminate at different periods, and bear immediate rela- 
tion to the whole mental life of the period. While perhaps some of 
the finer analyses of Colegrove may invite further confirmation, his 
main results given above are not only suggestive, but rendered very 
plausible by his evidence. 

Statistics based upon replies to the question as to whether 
pleasant or unpleasant experiences were best remembered, show that 
the former increase at eleven, rise rapidly at fourteen, and culminate 
at eighteen for males, and that the curve of painful memories follows 
the same course, although for both there is a drop at fifteen. For 
females, the pleasant memories increase rapidly from eleven to 
thirteen, decline a little at fourteen, rise again at sixteen, an,d 
culminate at seventeen, and the painful memories follow nearly the 
same course, only with a slight drop at fifteen. Thus, up to twenty- 
two for males, there is a marked preponderance of pleasant over 
painful memories, although the two rise and fall together. After 
thirty, unpleasant memories are but little recalled. For the Indians 
and negroes in this census, unpleasant memories play a far more 
and often preponderating role suggesting persecution and sad ex- 
periences. Different elements of the total content of memory come 
to prominence at different ages. He also found that the best re- 
membered years of life are sixteen to seventeen for males and fifteen 
for females, and that in general the adolescent period has more to 
do than any other in forming and furnishing the memory plexus, 
while the seventh and eighth years are most poorly remembered. 

It is also known that many false memories insert themselves into 

275 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

the texture of remembered experiences. One dreams a friend is 
dead and thinks she is till she is met one day in the street ; or dreams 
of a fire and inquires about it in the morning; dreams of a present 
and searches the house for it next day; delays breakfast for a friend, 
who arrived the night before in a dream, to come down to breakfast; 
a child hunts for a bushel of pennies dreamed of, etc. These phan- 
toms falsify our memory most often, according to Dr. Colegrove, 
between sixteen and nineteen. 

Mnemonic devices prompt children to change rings to keep ap- 
pointments, tie knots in the handkerchief, put shoes on the dressing- 
table, hide garments, associate faces with hoods, names with acts, 
things, or qualities they suggest; visualize, connect figures, letters 
with colors, etc. From a scrutiny of the original material, which I 
was kindly allowed to make, this appears to rise rapidly at puberty. 



276 



CHAPTER XI 

THE EDUCATION OP GIRLS 

Equal opportunities of higher education now open — Brings new dangers 
to women — Ineradicable sex differences begin at puberty, when the 
sexes should and do diverge — Different interests — Sex tension — Girls 
more mature than boys at the same age — Radical psj^chic and physio- 
logical differences between the sexes — The bachelor women — Need- 
ed reconstruction — Food — Sleep — Regimen — Manners — Religion — 
Regularity — The topics for a girls' curriculum — The eternal womanly. 

The long battle of woman and her friends for equal 
educational and other opportunities is essentially won 
all along the line. Her academic achievements have 
forced conservative minds to admit that her intellect 
is not inferior to that of man. The old cloistral se- 
clusion and exclusion is forever gone and new ideals 
are arising. It has been a noble movement and is a 
necessary first stage of woman's emancipation. The 
caricatured maidens '* as beautiful as an angel but as 
silly as a goose," who come from the kitchen to the 
husband's study to ask how much is two times two, 
and are told it is four for a man and three for a 
woman, and go back with a happy '' Thank you, my 
dear ' ' ; those who love to be called baby, and appeal 
to instincts half parental in their lovers and husbands; 
those who find all the sphere they desire in a doll 's house, 
like Nora's, and are content to be men's pets; whose 
ideal is the clinging vine, and who take no interest in 
the field where their husbands struggle, will perhaps 

277 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

soon survive only as a diminishing remainder. Mar- 
riages do still occur where woman's ignorance and 
helplessness seem to be the chief charm to men, and 
may be happy, but such eases are no farther from the 
present ideal and tendency on the one hand than on the 
other are those which consist in intellectual partnerships, 
in which there is no segregation of interests but which 
are devoted throughout to joint work or enjoyment. 

A typical contemporary writer ^ thinks the question 
whether a girl shall receive a college education is very 
like the same question for boys. Even if the four K's, 
Kirche, Kinder, Kuchen, and Kleider (which may be 
translated by the four C's, Church, Children, Cooking, 
and Clothes), are her vocation, college may help her. 
The best training for a young woman is not the old college 
course that has proven unfit for young men. Most college 
men look forward to a professional training as few women 
do. The latter have often greater sympathy, readiness of 
memory, patience with technic, skill in literature and 
language, but lack originality, are not attracted by un- 
solved problems, are less motor-minded; but their 
training is just as serious and important as that of men. 
The best results are where the sexes are brought closer 
together, because their separation generally emphasizes 
for girls the technical training for the profession of 
womanhood. With girLs, literature and language take 
precedence over science: expression stands higher than 
action; the scholarship may be superior, but is not ef- 
fective; the educated woman '' is likely to master 
technic rather than art ; method, rather than substance. 



1 David Starr Jordan: The Higher Education of Women. Popular 
Science Monthly, December, 1902, vol. 62, pp. 97-107. See also my 
article on this subject in Munsey's Magazine, February, 1906, and 
President Jordan's reply in the March number, 1906. 

278 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

She may know a good deal, but she can do nothing. ' ' In 
most separate colleges for women, old traditions are 
more prevalent than in colleges for men. In the annex 
system, she does not get the best of the institution. By 
the coeducation method, " young men are more earnest, 
better in manners and morals, and in all ways more 
civilized than under monastic conditions. The women 
do more work in a more natural way, with better per- 
spective and with saner incentives than when isolated 
from the influence of the society of men. There is 
less silliness and folly where a man is not a novelty. 
In coeducational institutions of high standards, frivo- 
lous conduct or scandals of any form are rarely known. 
The responsibility for decorum is thrown from the 
school to the woman, and the woman rises to the re- 
sponsibility." The character of college work has not 
been lowered but raised by coeducation, despite the fact 
that most of the new, small, weak colleges are coedu- 
cational. Social strain, Jordan thinks, is easily regu- 
lated, and the dormitory system is on the whole best, 
because the college atmosphere is highly prized. The 
reasons for the present reaction against coeducation are 
ascribed partly to the dislike of the idle boy to have 
girls excel him and see his failures, or because rowdyish 
tendencies are checked by the presence of women. Some 
think that girls do not help athletics; that men count 
for most because they are more apt to be heard from 
later ; but the most serious new argument is the fear that 
woman's standards and amateurishness will take the 
place of specialization. Women take up higher educa- 
tion because they like it; men because their careers 
depend upon it. Hence their studies are more objec- 
tive and face the world as it is. In college the women 
do as well as men, but not in the university. The half- 
19 279 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

educated woman as a social factor has produced many 
soft lecture courses and cheap books. This is an argu- 
ment for the higher education of the sex. Finally, 
Jordan insists that coeducation leads to marriage, and 
he believes that its best basis is common interest and 
intellectual friendship. 

From the available data it seems, however, that the 
more scholastic the education of women, the fewer chil- 
dren and the harder, more dangerous, and more dreaded 
is parturition, and the less the ability to nurse children. 
Not intelligence, but education by present man-made 
ways, is inversely as fecundity. The sooner and the 
more clearly this is recognized as a universal rule, not, 
of course, without many notable and much vaunted ex- 
ceptions, the better for our civilization. For one, I 
plead with no whit less earnestness and conviction than 
any of the feminists, and indeed with more fervor be- 
cause on nearly all their grounds and also on others, for 
the higher education of women, and would welcome 
them to every opportunity available to men if they can 
not do better; but I would open to their election an- 
other education, which every competent judge would 
pronounce more favorable to motherhood, under the 
influence of female principals who do not publicly say 
that it is '' not desirable " that women students should 
study motherhood, because they do not know whether 
they will marry; who encourage them to elect '* no 
special subjects because they are women," and who 
think infant psychology '' foolish." 

Various interesting experiments in coeducation are 
now being made in England.^ Some are whole-hearted 

1 Coeducation. A series of essays by various authors, edited by Alice 
Woods, with an introduction by M. E. Sadler. Longmans, Green and 
Co., London, 1903, p. 148 et seq. 

280 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

and encourage the girls to do almost everything that 
the boys do in both study and play. There are girl 
prefects; cricket teams are formed sometimes of both 
sexes, but often the sexes matched against each other; 
one play-yard, a dual staff of teachers, and friendships 
between the boys and girls are not tabooed, etc. In 
other schools the sexes meet perhaps in recitation only, 
have separate rooms for study, entrances, play-grounds, 
and their relations are otherwise restricted. The opin- 
ion of English writers generally favors coeducation up 
to about the beginning of the teens, and from there on 
views are more divided. It is admitted that, if there 
is a very great preponderance of either sex over the 
other, the latter is likely to lose its characteristic 
qualities, and something of this occurs where the average 
age of one sex is distinctly greater than that of the 
other. On the other hand, several urge that, where age 
and numbers are equal, each sex is more inclined to 
develop the best qualities peculiar to itself in the 
presence of the other. 

Some girls are no doubt far fitter for boys' studies 
and men's careers than others. Coeducation, too, gen- 
erally means far more assimilation of girls' to boys' 
ways and work than conversely. ^lany people believe 
that girls either gain or are more affected by coeduca- 
tion, especially in the upper grades, than boys. It is 
interesting, however, to observe the differences that still 
persist. Certain games, like football and boxing, girls 
can not play; they do not fight; they are not flogged 
or caned as English boys are when their bad marks foot 
up beyond a certain aggregate; girls are more prone 
to cliques; their punishments must be in appeals to 
school sentiment, to which they are exceedingly sensi- 
tive; it is hard for them to bear defeat in games with 

281 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

the same dignity and unruffled temper as boys; it is 
harder for them to accept the school standards of honor 
that condemn the tell-tale as a sneak, although they soon 
learn this. They may be a little in danger of being 
roughened by boyish ways and especially by the crude 
and unique language, almost a dialect in itself, preva- 
lent among schoolboys. Girls are far more prone to 
overdo; boys are persistingly lazy and idle. Girls are 
content to sit and have the subject-matter pumped into 
them by recitations, etc., and to merely accept, while 
boys are more inspired by being told to do things and 
make tests and experiments. In this, girls are often 
quite at sea. One writer speaks of a certain feminine 
obliquity, but hastens to say that girls in these schools 
soon accept its code of honor. It is urged, too, that 
in singing classes the voices of each sex are better in 
quality for the presence of the other. In many topics 
of all kinds boys and girls are interested in different 
aspects of the same theme, and therefore the work is 
broadened. In manual training, girls excel in all ar- 
tistic work; boys, in carpentry. Girls can be made 
not only less noxiously sentimental and impulsive, but 
their conduct tends to become more thoughtful; they 
can be made to feel responsibility for bestowing their 
praise aright and thus influencing the tone of the school. 
Calamitous as it would be for the education of boys 
beyond a certain age to be entrusted entirely or chiefly 
to women, it would be less so for that of girls to be 
given entirely to men. Perhaps the great women 
teachers, whose life and work have made them a power 
with girls comparable to that of Arnold and Thring 
with boys, are dying out. Very likely economic mo- 
tives are too dominant for this problem to be settled on 
its merits only. Finally, several writers mention the 

282 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

increased healthfulness of moral tone. The vices that 
infest boys' schools, which Arnold thought a quantity 
constantly changing with every class, are diminished. 
Healthful thoughts of sex, less subterranean and base 
imaginings on the one hand, and less gushy senti- 
mentality on the other, are favored. For either sex 
to be a copy of the other is to be weakened, and each 
comes normally to respect more and to prefer its 
own sex. 

Not to pursue this subject further here, it is probable 
that many of the causes for the facts set forth are very 
different and some of them almost diametrically op- 
posite in the two sexes. Hard as it is per se, it is after 
all a comparatively easy matter to educate boys. They 
are less peculiarly responsive in mental tone to the 
physical and psychic environment, tend more strongly 
and early to special interests, and react more vigor- 
ously against the obnoxious elements of their surround- 
ings. This is truest of the higher education, and more 
so in proportion as the tendencies of the age are toward 
special and vocational training. Woman, as we saw, 
in every fiber of her soul and body is a more generic 
creature than man, nearer to the race, and demands 
more and more with advancing age an education that 
is essentially liberal and humanistic. This is progress- 
ively hard when the sexes differentiate in the higher 
grades. Moreover, nature decrees that with advancing 
civilization the sexes shall not approximate, but differ- 
entiate, and we shall probably be obliged to carry sex 
distinctions, at least of method, into many if not most 
of the topics of the higher education. Now that woman 
has by general consent attained the right to the best 
that man has, she must seek a training that fits her 
own nature as well or better. So long as she strives 

283 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

to be manlike she will be inferior and a pinchbeck imi- 
tation, but she must develop a new sphere that shall 
be like the rich field of the cloth of gold for the best 
instincts of her nature. 

Divergence is most marked and sudden in the pu- 
bescent period — in the early teens. At this age, by 
almost world-wide consent, boys and girls separate for 
a time, and lead their lives during this most critical 
period more or less apart, at least for a few years, until 
the ferment of mind and body which results in maturity 
of functions then born and culminating in nubility, 
has done its work. The family and the home abundantly 
recognize this tendency. At twelve or fourteen, brothers 
and sisters develop a life more independent of each 
other than before. Their home occupations differ as do 
their plays, games, tastes. History, anthropology, and 
sociology, as well as home life, abundantly illustrate 
this. This is normal and biological. What our schools 
and other institutions should do, is not to obliterate 
these differences but to make boys more manly and girls 
more womanly. We should respect the law of sexual 
differences, and not forget that motherhood is a very 
different thing from fatherhood. Neither sex should 
copy nor set patterns to the other, but all parts should 
be played harmoniously and clearly in the great sex 
symphony. 

I have here less to say against coeducation in college, 
still less in university grades after the maturity which 
comes at eighteen or twenty has been achieved; but it 
is high time to ask ourselves whether the theory and 
practise of identical coeducation, especially in the high 
school, which has lately been carried to a greater ex- 
treme in this country than the rest of the world recog- 
nizes, has not brought certain grave dangers, and 

284 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

whether it does not interfere with the natural differ- 
entiations seen everywhere else. I recognize, of course, 
the great argument of economy. Indeed, we should save 
money and effort could we unite churches of not too 
diverse creeds. We could thus give better preaching, 
music, improve the edifice, etc. I am by no means ready 
to advocate the radical abolition of coeducation, but 
we can already sum up in a rough, brief way our ac- 
count of profit and loss with it. On the one hand, no 
doubt each sex develops some of its own best qualities 
best in the presence of the other, but the question still 
remains, how much, when, and in what way, identical 
coeducation secures this end? 

As has been said, girls and boys are often interested in 
different aspects of the same topic, and this may have a 
tendency to broaden the view-point of both and bring it 
into sympathy with that of the other, but the question 
still remains whether one be not too much attracted to the 
sphere of the other, especially girls to that of boys. No 
doubt some girls become a little less gushy, their con- 
duct more thoughtful, and their sense of responsibility 
greater; for one of woman's great functions, which is 
that of bestowing praise aright, is increased. There is 
also much evidence that certain boys' vices are miti- 
gated; they are made more urbane and their thoughts 
of sex made more healthful. In some respects boys are 
stimulated to good scholarship by girls, who in many 
schools and topics excel them. We should ask, however. 
What is nature's way at this stage of life? Whether 
boys, in order to be well virified later, ought not to 
be so boisterous and even rough as to be at times unfit 
companions for girls; or whether, on the other hand, 
girls to be best matured ought not to have their senti- 
jnental periods of instability, especially when we venture 

285 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

to raise the question, whether for a girl in the early 
teens, when her health for her whole life depends upon 
normalizing the lunar month, there is not something un- 
hygienic, unnatural, not to say a little monstrous, in 
school associations with boys when she must suppress 
and conceal her feelings and instinctive promptings at 
those times which suggest withdrawing, to let nature 
do its beautiful work of inflorescence. It is a sacred 
time of reverent exemption from the hard struggle of 
existence in the world and from mental effort in the 
school. Medical specialists, many of the best of whom 
now insist that through this period she should be, as it 
were, '' turned out to grass," or should lie fallow, so 
far as intellectual efforts go, one-fourth the time, no 
doubt often go too far, but their unanimous voice should 
not entirely be disregarded. 

It is not this, however, that I have chiefly in mind 
here, but the effects of too familiar relations and, 
especially, of the identical work, treatment, and environ- 
ment of the modern school. 

We have now at least eight good and independent 
statistical studies which show that the ideals of boys from 
ten years on are almost always those of their own sex, 
while girls' ideals are increasingly of the opposite sex, 
or those of men. That the ideals of pubescent girls 
are not found in the great and noble women of the 
world or in their literature, but more and more in 
men, suggests a divorce between the ideals adopted and 
the line of life best suited to the interests of the race. 
We are not furnished in our public schools with ade- 
quate womanly ideals in history or literature. The new 
love of freedom which women have lately felt inclines 
girls to abandon the home for the office. " It surely 
can hardly be called an ideal education for women that 

286 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

permits eighteen out of one hundred college girls to 
state boldly that they would rather be men than 
women. ' ' More than one-half of the schoolgirls in these 
censuses choose male ideals, as if those of femininity are 
disintegrating. A recent writer/ in view of this fact, 
states that " unless there is a change of trend, wt shall 
soon have a female sex without a female character." 
In the progressive numerical feminization of our schools 
most teachers, perhaps naturally and necessarily, have 
more or less masculine ideals, and this does not en- 
courage the development of those that constitute the 
glory of womanhood. " At every age from eight to 
sixteen, girls named from three to twenty more ideals 
than boys." '' These facts indicate a condition of 
diffused interests and lack of clear-cut purposes and a 
need of integration." 

When we turn to boys the case is different. In most 
public high schools girls preponderate, especially in the 
upper classes, and in many of them the boys that re- 
main are practically in a girls' school, sometimes taught 
chiefly, if not solely, by women teachers at an age 
when strong men should be in control more than at 
any other period of life. Boys need a different dis- 
cipline and moral regimen and atmosphere. They also 
need a different method of work. Girls excel them in 
learning and memorization, accepting studies upon sug- 
gestion or authority, but are often quite at sea when 
set to make tests and experiments that give individuality 
and a chance for self-expression, which is one of the 
best things in boyhood. Girls preponderate in our 
overgrown high school Latin and algebra, because cus- 

1 The Evolution of Ideals. W. G. Chambers, Pedagogical Seminary, 
March, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 101-143. Also, B. E. Warner: The Yotmg 
Woman in Modern Life. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1903, p. 218. 

287 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

torn and tradition and, perhaps, advice incline them 
to it. They preponderate in English and history classes 
more often, let us hope, from inner inclination. The boy 
sooner grows restless in a curriculum where form takes 
precedence over content. He revolts at much method 
with meager matter. He craves utility, and when all 
these instincts are denied, without knowing what is the 
matter, he drops out of school, when with robust tone 
and with a truly boy life, such as prevails at Harrow, 
Eton, and Rugby, he would have fought it through and 
have done well. This feminization of the school spirit, 
discipline, and personnel is bad for boys. Of course, 
on the whole, perhaps, they are made more gentlemanly, 
more at ease, their manners improved, and all this to a 
woman teacher seems excellent, but something is the mat- 
ter with the boy in early teens who can be truly called ' ' a 
perfect gentleman." That should come later, V'hen the 
brute and animal element have had opportunity to work 
themselves off in a healthful normal way. They still 
have football to themselves, and are the majority per- 
haps in chemistry, and sometimes in physics, but there 
is danger of a settled eviration. The segregation, which 
even some of our schools are now attempting, is always 
in some degree necessary for full and complete develop- 
ment. Just as the boys' language is apt to creep into 
that of the girl, so girls' interests, ways, standards and 
tastes, which are crude at this age, sometimes attract 
boys out of their orbit. While some differences are 
emphasized by contact, others are compromised. Boys 
tend to grow content with mechanical, memorized work 
and, excelling on the lines of girls' qualities, fail to de- 
velop those of their own. There is a little charm and 
bloom rubbed off the ideal of girlhood by close con- 
tact, and boyhood seems less ideal to girls at close range. 
• 288 



J 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

In place of the mystic attraction of the other sex that 
has inspired so much that is best in the world, familiar 
comradeship brings a little disenchantment. The im- 
pulse to be at one's best in the presence of the other 
sex grows lax and sex tension remits, and each comes 
to feel itself seen through, so that there is less motive 
to indulge in the ideal conduct which such motives in- 
spire, because the call for it is incessant. This disillu- 
sioning weakens the motivation to marriage sometimes 
on both sides, when girls grow careless in their dress 
and too negligent in their manners, one of the best 
schools of woman's morals; and when boys lose all 
restraints which the presence of girls usually enforces, 
there is a subtle deterioration. Thus, I believe, although 
of course it is impossible to prove, that this is one of 
the factors of a decreasing percentage of marriage 
among educated young men and women. 

At eighteen or twenty the girl normally reaches a 
stage of first maturity when her ideas of life are amaz- 
ingly keen and true; when, if her body is developed, 
she can endure a great deal; when she is nearest, per- 
haps, the ideal of feminine beauty and perfection. Of 
this we saw illustrations in Chapter VIII. In our en- 
vironment, however, there is a little danger that this 
age once well past there will slowly arise a slight sense 
of aimlessness or lassitude, unrest, uneasiness, as if one 
weve almost unconsciously feeling along the wall for a 
door to which the key was not at hand. Thus some 
lose their bloom and, yielding to the great danger of 
young womanhood, slowly lapse to an anxious state 
of expectancy, or desire something not within their 
reach, and so the diathesis of restlessness slowly super- 
venes. The best thing about college life for girls is, 
perhaps, that it postpones this incipient disappoint- 

289 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

ment; but it is a little pathetic to me to read, as I 
have lately done, the class letters of hundreds of girl 
graduates, out of college one, two, or three years, turn- 
ing a little to art, music, travel, teaching, charity work, 
one after the other, or trying to find something to which 
they can devote themselves, some cause, movement, 
occupation, where their capacity for altruism and self- 
sacrifice can find a field. The tension is almost im- 
perceptible, perhaps quite unconscious. It is every- 
where overborne by a keen interest in life, by a desire 
to know the world at first hand, while susceptibilities are 
at their height. The apple of intelligence has been 
plucked at perhaps a little too great cost of health. The 
purely mental has not been quite sufficiently kept back. 
The girl wishes to know a good deal more of the world 
and perfect her own personality, and would not marry, 
although every cell of her body and every unconscious 
impulse points to just that end. Soon, it may be in 
five or ten years or more, the complexion of ill health 
is seen in these notes, or else life has been adjusted 
to independence and self-support. Many of these 
bachelor women are magnificent in mind and body, but 
they lack wifehood and yet more — motherhood. 

In fine, we should use these facts as a stimulus to 
ask more searchingly the question whether the present 
system of higher education for both sexes is not lacking 
in some very essential elements, and if so what these 
are. Indeed, considering the facts that in our social 
system man makes the advances and that woman is by 
nature more prone than man to domesticity and parent- 
hood, it is not impossible that men's colleges do more to 
unfit for these than do those for women. One cause 
may be moral. Ethics used to be taught as a practical 
power for life and reenforced by religious motives. Now 

290 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

it is theoretical and speculative and too often led cap- 
tive by metaphysical and epistemological speculations. 
Sometimes girls work or worry more over studies and 
ideals than is good for their constitution, and boys grow 
idle and indifferent, and this proverbially tends to bad 
habits. Perhaps fitting for college has been too hard at 
the critical age of about eighteen, and requirements of 
honest, persevering work during college years too little 
enforced, or grown irksome by physiological reaction of 
lassitude from the strain of fitting and entering. Again, 
girls mature earlier than boys; and the latter who have 
been educated with them tend to certain elements of 
maturity and completeness too early in life, and their 
growth period is shortened or its momentum lessened 
by an atmosphere of femininity. Something is clearly 
wrong, and more so here than we have at present any 
reason to think is the case among the academic male or 
female youth of other lands. To see and admit that 
there is an evil very real, deep, exceedingly difficult and 
complex in its causes, but grave and demanding a care- 
ful reconsideration of current educational ideas and 
practises, is the first step ; and this every thoughtful and 
well-informed mind, I believe, must now take. 

It is utterly impossible without injury to hold girls 
to the same standards of conduct, regularity, severe moral 
accountability, and strenuous mental work that boys 
need. The privileges and immunities of her sex are 
inveterate, and with these the American girl in the 
middle teens fairly tingles with a new-born consciousness. 
Already she occasionally asserts herself in the public 
high school against a male teacher or principal who seeks 
to enforce discipline by methods boys respect, in a way 
that suggests that the time is at hand when popularity 
with her sex will be as necessary in a successful teacher 

291 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

as it is in the pulpit. In these interesting cases where 
girl sentiment has made itself felt in school it has gen- 
erally carried parents, committeemen, the press, and 
public sentiment before it, and has already made a 
precious little list of martyrs whom, were I an educational 
pope, I would promptly canonize. The progressive fem- 
inization of secondary education works its subtle demor- 
alization on the male teachers who remain. Public 
sentiment would sustain them in many parental exactions 
with boys which it disallows in mixed classes. It 
is hard, too, for male principals of schools with only 
female teachers not to suffer some deterioration in the 
moral tone of their virility and to lose in the power to 
cope successfully with men. Not only is this often con- 
fessed and deplored, but the incessant compromises the 
best male teachers of mixed classes must make with their 
pedagogic convictions in both teaching and discipline 
make the profession less attractive to manly men of large 
caliber and of sound fiber. Again, the recent rapid in- 
crease of girls, the percentage of w^hich to population in 
high schools has in many communities doubled in but 
little more than a decade, almost necessarily involves a 
decline in the average quality of girls, perhaps as much 
greater for them as compared with boys as their increase 
has been greater. When but few were found in these in- 
stitutions they wTre usually picked girls with superior 
tastes and ability, but now the average girl of the rank 
and file is, despite advanced standards of admission, of an 
order natively lower. From this deterioration both boys 
and teachers suffer, even though the greatest good for the 
greatest number may be enhanced. Once more, it is 
generally admitted that girls in good boarding-schools, 
where evenings, food, and regimen are controlled, are in 
better health than day pupils with social, church, and 

292 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

domestic duties and perhaps worries to which boys are 
less subject. This is the nascent stage of periodicity to 
the slow normalization of which, during these few critical 
years, everything that interferes should yield. Some 
kind of tacit recognition of this is indispensable, but in 
mixed classes every form of such concession is baffling 
and demoralizing to boys. 

The women who really achieve the higher culture 
should make it their " cause " or " mission " to work 
out the new humanistic or liberal education which the 
old college claimed to stand for and which now needs 
radical reconstruction to meet the demands of modern 
life. In science they should aim to restore the humanistic 
elements of its history, biography, its popular features 
at their best, and its applications in all the more non- 
technical fields, as described in Chapter XII, and feel 
responsibility not to let the moral, religious, and poetic 
aspects of nature be lost in utilities. Woman should be 
true to her generic nature and take her stand against all 
premature specialization, and when the Zeitgeist ^ in- 
sists on specialized training for occupative pursuits with- 
out waiting for broad foundations to be laid, she should 
resist all these influences that make for psychological pre- 
cocity. Das Eivig-Weihliche ^ is no iridescent fiction 
but a very definable reality, and means perennial youth. 
It means that woman at her best never outgrows ado- 
lescence as man does, but lingers in, magnifies and glori- 
fies this culminating stage of life with its all-sided inter- 
ests, its convertibility of emotions, its enthusiasm, and 
zest for all that is good, beautiful, true, and heroic. This 
constitutes her freshness and charm, even in age, and 
makes her by nature more humanistic than man, more 



Spirit of the Times. 2 The eternal womanly. 

293 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

sympathetic and appreciative. It is not chiefly the 
70,000 superfluous Massachusetts women of the last cen- 
sus, but representatives of every class and age in the 4,000 
women's clubs of this country that now find some leis- 
ure for general culture in all fields, and in which most 
of them no doubt surpass their husbands. Those who 
still say that men do not like women to be their mental 
superiors and that no man was ever won by the attraction 
of intellect, on the one hand, and those who urge that 
women really want husbands to be their intellectual su- 
periors, both misapprehend. The male in all the orders 
of life is the agent of variation and tends by nature to 
expertness and specialization, without which his individu- 
ality is incomplete. In his chosen line he would lead and 
be authoritative, and he rarely seeks partnership in it in 
marriage. This is no subjection, but woman instinctively 
respects and even reveres, and perhaps educated woman 
is coming to demand, it in the man of her whole-hearted 
choice. This granted, man was never more plastic 
to woman's great work of creating in him all the wide 
range of secondary sex qualities which constitute his es- 
sential manhood. In all this, the pedagogic fathers we 
teach in the history of education are most of them about 
as luminous and obsolete as is patristics for the religious 
teacher, or as methods of other countries are coming to 
be in solving our own peculiar pedagogic problems. The 
relation of the academically trained sexes is faintly 
typified by that of the ideal college to the ideal university, 
professional or technical school. This is the harmony of 
counterparts and constitutes the best basis of psychic 
amphimixis. For the reinstallation of the humanistic 
college, the time has come when cultivated woman ought 
to come forward and render vital aid. If she does so 
and helps to evolve a high school and an A. B. course that 

294 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

is truly liberal, it will not only fit her nature and needs 
far better than anything now existing, but young men at 
the humanistic stage of their own education will seek to 
profit by it, and she will thus repay her debt to man in 
the past by aiding him to de-universitize the college and 
to rescue secondary education from its gravest dangers. 

But even should all this be done, coeducation would by 
no means be thus justified. If adolescent boys normally 
pass through a generalized or even feminized stage of 
psychic development in which they are peculiarly plastic 
to the guidance of older women w^ho have such rare in- 
sight into their nature, such infinite sympathy and 
patience with all the symptoms of their storm and stress 
metamorphosis, when they seek everything by turns and 
nothing long, and if young men will forever afterward 
understand woman's nature better for living out more 
fully this stage of their lives and will fail to do so if it 
is abridged or dwarfed, it by no means follows that inti- 
mate daily and class-room association with girls of their 
own age is necessary or best. The danger of this is that 
the boy 's instinct to assert his own manhood will thus be 
made premature and excessive, that he will react against 
general culture, in the capacity for which girls, who are 
older than boys at the same age, naturally excel them. 
Companionship and comparisons incline him to take pre- 
mature refuge in some one talent that emphasizes his psy- 
cho-sexual difference too soon. Again, he is farther from 
nubile maturity than the girl classmate of his own age, 
and coeducation and marriage between them are prone 
to violate the important physiological law of disparity 
that requires the husband to be some years the wife's 
senior, both in their own interests, as maturity begins to 
decline to age, and in those of their offspring. Thus the 
young man with his years of restraint and probation 
20 295 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

ahead, and his inflammable desires, is best removed from 
the half-conscious cerebrations about wedlock, inevitably 
more insistent with constant girl companionship. If he 
resists this during all the years of his apprenticeship, he 
grows more immune and inhibitive of it when its proper 
hour arrives, and perhaps becomes in soul a bachelor 
before his time. In this side of his nature he is forever 
incommensurate with and unintelligible to woman, be she 
even teacher, sister, or mother. Better some risk of gross 
thoughts and even acts, to which phylogeny and recapit- 
ulation so strongly incline him, than this subtle eviration. 
Bat if the boy is unduly repelled from the sphere of 
girls' interests, the girl is in some danger of being un- 
duly drawn to his, and, as we saw above, of forgetting 
some of the ideals of her own sex. Riper in mind and 
body than her male classmate, and often excelling him 
in the capacity of acquisition, nearer the age of her full 
maturity than he to his, he seems a little too crude and 
callow to fulfil the ideals of manhood normal to her age 
which point to older and riper men. In all that makes 
sexual attraction best, a classmate of her own age is too 
undeveloped, and so she often suffers mute disenchant- 
ment, and even if engagement be dreamed of, it would be, 
on her part, with unconscious reservations if not with 
some conscious renunciation of ideals. Thus the boy is 
correct in feeling himself understood and seen through 
by his girl classmates to a degree that is sometimes quite 
distasteful to him, while the girl finds herself misunder- 
stood by and disappointed in men. Boys arrive at the 
humanistic stage of culture later than girls and pass it 
sooner; and to find them already there and with their 
greater aptitude excelling him, is not an inviting situa- 
tion, and so he is tempted to abridge or cut it out and to 
hasten on and be mature and professional before his time, 

296 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

for thus he gravitates toward his normal relation to her 
sex of expert mastership on some bread- or fame-winning 
line. Of course, these influences are not patent, demon- 
strable by experiment, or measurable by statistics ; but I 
have come to believe that, like many other facts and laws, 
they have a reality and a dominance that is all-pervasive 
and inescapable, and that they will ultimately prevail 
over economic motives and traditions. 

To be a true woman means to be yet more mother 
than wife. The madonna conception expresses man's 
highest comprehension of woman's real nature. Sexual 
relations are brief, but love and care of offspring are long. 
The elimination of maternity is one of the great calam- 
ities, if not diseases, of our age. Marholm ^ points out 
at length how art again to-day gives w^oman a waspish 
waist with no abdomen, as if to carefully score away 
every trace of her mission ; usually with no child in her 
arms or even in sight; a mere figurine, calculated per- 
haps to entice, but not to bear; incidentally degrading 
the artist who depicts her to a fashion-plate painter, per- 
haps with suggestions of the arts of toilet, cosmetics, and 
coquetry, as if to promote decadent reaction to decadent 
stimuli. As in the Munchausen tale, the w^olf slowly ate 
the running nag from behind until he found himself in 
the harness, so in the disoriented woman the mistress, 
virtuous and otherwise, is slowly supplanting the mother. 
Please she must, even though she can not admire, and can 
so easily despise men who can not lead her, although she 
become thereby lax and vapid. 

The more exhausted men become, whether by over- 
work, unnatural city life, alcohol, recrudescent poly- 
gamic inclinations, exclusive devotion to greed and pelf ; 

1 The Psychology of Woman. Translated by G. A. Etchison. 
Richards, London, 1899. 

297 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

whether they become weak, stooping, blear-eyed, bald- 
headed, bow-legged, thin-shanked, or gross, coarse, bar- 
baric, and bestial, the more they lose the power to lead 
woman or to arouse her nature, which is essentially 
passive. Thus her perversions are his fault. Man, be- 
fore he lost the soil and piety, was not only her protector 
and provider, but her priest. He not only supported 
and defended, but inspired the souls of women, so admir- 
ably calculated to receive and elaborate suggestions, but 
not to originate them. In their inmost souls even young 
girls often experience disenchantment, find men little and 
no heroes, and so cease to revere and begin to think 
stupidly of them as they think coarsely of her. Some- 
times the girlish conceptions of men are too romantic and 
exalted ; often the intimacy of school and college wear oif 
a charm, while man must not forget that to-day he too 
often fails to realize the just and legitimate expectations 
and ideals of women. If women confide themselves, body 
and soul, less to him than he desires, it is not she, but he, 
who is often chiefly to blame. Indeed, in some psychic 
respects, it seems as if in human society the processes of 
subordinating the male to the female, carried so far in 
some of the animal species, had already begun. If he is 
not worshiped as formerly, it is because he is less worship- 
ful or more effeminate, less vigorous and less able to ex- 
cite and retain the great love of true, not to say great, 
women. Where marriage and maternity are of less su- 
preme interest to an increasing number of women, there 
are various results, the chief of which are as follows : 

1. Women grow dollish ; sink more or less consciously 
to man's level; gratify his desires and even his selfish 
caprices, but exact in return luxury and display, growing 
vain as he grows sordid ; thus, while submitting, conquer- 
ing, and tyrannizing over him, content with present 

298 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

worldly pleasure, unmindful of the past, the future, or 
the above. This may react to intersexual antagonism 
until man comes to hate woman as a witch, or, as in the 
days of celibacy, consider sex a wile of the devil. Along 
these lines even the stage is beginning to represent the 
tragedies of life. 

2. The disappointed woman in whom something is 
dying comes to assert her own ego and more or less con- 
sciously to make it an end, aiming to possess and realize 
herself fully rather than to transmit. Despairing of her- 
self as a woman, she asserts her lower rights in the place 
of her one great right to be loved. The desire for love 
may be transmuted into the desire for knowledge, or 
outward achievement become a substitute for inner 
content. Failing to respect herself as a productive or- 
ganism, she gives vent to personal ambitions ; seeks inde- 
pendence ; comes to know very plainly what she wants ; 
perhaps becomes intellectually emancipated, and substi- 
tutes science for religion, or the doctor for the priest, 
with the all-sided impressionability characteristic of her 
sex which, when cultivated, is so like an awakened child. 
She perhaps even affects mannish ways, unconsciously 
copying from those not most manly, or comes to feel that 
she has been robbed of something; competes with men, 
but sometimes where they are most sordid, brutish, and 
strongest ; always expecting, but never finding, she turns 
successively to art, science, literature, and reforms; 
craves especially work that she can not do ; and seeks 
stimuli for feelings which have never found their legiti- 
mate expression. 

3. Another type, truer to woman's nature, subordi- 
nates self; goes beyond personal happiness; adopts the 
motto of self-immolation ; enters a life of service, denial, 
and perhaps mortification, like the Countess Schimmel- 

299 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

mann; and perhaps becomes a devotee, a saint, and, 
if need be, a martyr, but all witli modesty, humility, 
and with a shrinking from publicity. 

In our civilization, I believe that bright girls of good 
environment of eighteen or nineteen, or even seventeen, 
have already reached the above-mentioned peculiar stage 
of first maturity, when they see the world at first hand, 
when the senses are at their very best, their susceptibil- 
ities and their insights the keenest, tension at its highest, 
plasticity and all-sided interests most developed, and 
their whole psychic soil richest and rankest and sprout- 
ing everywhere with the tender shoots of everything 
both good and bad. Some such — Stella Klive, ]\Iary 
MacLane, Hilma Strandberg, Marie Bashkirtseff — have 
been veritable spies upon woman's nature; have revealed 
the characterlessness normal to the prenubile period in 
which everything is kept tentative and plastic, and 
where life seems to have least unity, aim, or purpose. By 
and by perhaps they will see in all their scrappy past, if 
not order and coherence, a justification, and then alone 
will they realize that life is governed by motives deeper 
than those which are conscious or even personal. This 
is the age when, if ever, no girl should be compelled. It 
is the experiences of this age, never entirely obliterated 
in women, that enable them to take adolescent boys 
seriously, as men can rarely do, in whom these experi- 
ences are more limited in range though no less intense. 
It is this stage in woman which is most unintelligible to 
man and even unrealized to herself. It is the echoes from 
it that make vast numbers of mothers pursue the various 
branches of culture, often half secretly, to maintain their 
position with their college sons and daughters, with their 
husbands, or with society. 

But in a very few years, I believe even in the early 
300 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

twenties with American girls, along with rapidly in- 
creasing development of capacity there is also observable 
the beginnings of loss and deterioration. Unless mar- 
riage comes there is lassitude, subtle symptoms of inva- 
lidism, the germs of a rather aimless dissatisfaction with 
life, a little less interest, curiosity, and courage, certain 
forms of self -pampering, the resolution to be happy, 
though at too great cost ; and thus the clear air of morn- 
ing begins to haze over and unconsciously she begins to 
grope. By thirty, she is perhaps goaded into more or 
less sourness ; has developed more petty self-indulgences ; 
has come to feel a right to happiness almost as passion- 
ately as the men of the French Revolution and as the 
women in their late movement for enfranchisement felt 
for liberty. Very likely she has turned to other women 
and entered into innocent Platonic pairing-off relations 
with some one. There is a little more affectation, play- 
ing a role, and interest in dress and appearance is either 
less or more specialized and definite. Perhaps she has 
already begun to be a seeker who will perhaps find, lose, 
and seek again. Her temper is modified ; there is a slight 
stagnation of soul ; a craving for work or travel ; a love 
of children with flitting thoughts of adopting one, or 
else aversion to them; an analysis of psychic processes 
until they are weakened and insight becomes too clear; 
a sense of responsibility without an object ; a slight gen- 
eral malaise and a sense that society is a false " mar- 
garine " affair; revolt against those that insist that in 
her child the real value of a woman is revealed. There 
are alternations between excessive self-respect which de- 
mands something almost like adoration of the other sex 
and self-distrust, with, it may be, many dreameries 
about forbidden subjects and about the relations of the 
sexes generally. 

301 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

A new danger, the greatest in the history of her sex, 
now impends, viz., arrest, complacency, and a sense of 
finality in the most perilous first stage of higher educa- 
tion for girls, when, after all, little has actually yet been 
won save only the right and opportunity to begin recon- 
structions, so that now, for the first time in history, 
methods and matter could be radically transformed to 
fit the nature and needs of girls. Now most female fac- 
ulties, trustees, and students are content to ape the 
newest departures in some one or more male institutions 
as far as their means or obvious limitations make possi- 
ble with a servility which is often abject and with rarely 
ever a thought of any adjustment, save the most super- 
ficial, to sex. It is the easiest, and therefore the most 
common, view typically expressed by the female head of 
a very successful institution,^ who was ' ' early convinced 
in my teaching experience that the methods for mental 
development for boys and girls applied equally without 
regard to sex, and I have carried the same thought when 
I began to develop the physical, and filled my gymnasium 
with the ordinary appliances used in men's gymnasia." 
There is no sex in mind or in science, it is said, but it 
might as well be urged that there is no age, and hence that 
all methods adapted to teaching at different stages of de- 
velopment may be ignored. That woman can do many 
things as well as man does not prove that she ought to do 
the same things, or that man-made ways are the best for 
her. Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer ^ was right in saying 
that woman's education has all the perplexities of that 

1 Physical Development of Women and Children. By Miss M. E. 
Allen, American Association for Physical Education, April, 1890. 

2 A Review of the Higher Education of Women. Forum, September, 
1891, vol. 12, pp. 25-40. See also G. von Bunge: Die zunehmende Un- 
fahigkeit der Frauen ihre Kinder zu stillen. Miinchen, Reinhardt, 1903, 
3d ed. Also President Harper's Decennial Report, pp. xciv-cxi. 

302 



I 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

of man, and many more, still more difficult and intricate, 
of its own. 

Hence, we must conclude that, while women's col- 
leges have to a great extent solved the problem of special 
technical training, they have done as yet very little to 
solve the larger one of the proper education of woman. 
To assume that the latter question is settled, as is so often 
done, is disastrous. I have forced myself to go through 
many elaborate reports of meetings where female educa- 
tion was discussed by those supposed to be competent; 
but as a rule, not without rare, striking exceptions, these 
proceedings are smitten with the same sterile and com- 
placent artificiality that was so long the curse of woman 's 
life. I deem it almost reprehensible that, save a few 
general statistics, the women's colleges have not only 
made no study themselves of the larger problems that 
impend, but have often maintained a repellent attitude 
toward others who wished to do so. No one that I know 
of connected with any of these institutions, where the 
richest material is going to waste, is making any serious 
and competent research on lines calculated to bring out 
the psycho-physiological differences between the sexes, 
and those in authority are either conservative by constitu- 
tion or else intimidated because public opinion is still 
liable to panics if discussion here becomes scientific and 
fundamental, and so tend to keep prudery and the old 
habit of ignoring everything that pertains to sex in 
countenance. 

Again, w^hile I sympathize profoundly with the claim 
of woman for every opportunity which she can fill, and 
yield to none in appreciation of her ability, I insist that 
the cardinal defect in the woman's college is that it is 
based upon the assumption, implied and often expressed, 
if not almost universally acknowledged, that girls should 

303 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

primarily be trained to independence and self-support, 
and that matrimony and motherhood, if it come, will take 
care of itself, or, as some even urge, is thus best provided 
for. If these colleges are, as the above statistics indicate, 
chiefly devoted to the training of those who do not marry, 
or if they are to educate for celibacy, this is right. These 
institutions may perhaps come to be training stations of 
a new-old type, the agamic or even agenic woman, be she 
aunt, maid — old or young — nun, school-teacher, or bach- 
elor woman. I recognize the very great debt the world 
owes to members of this very diverse class in the past. 
Some of them have illustrated the very highest ideals of 
self-sacrifice, service, and devotion in giving to mankind 
what was meant for husband and children. Some of 
them belong to the class of superfluous women, and others 
illustrate the noblest type of altruism and have im- 
poverished the heredity of the world to its loss, as did the 
monks, who Leslie Stephens thinks contributed to bring 
about the Dark Ages, because they were the best and 
most highly selected men of their age and, by withdraw- 
ing from the function of heredity and leaving no pos- 
terity, caused Europe to degenerate. Modern ideas and 
training are now doing this, whether for racial weal or 
woe can not yet be determined, for many whom nature 
designed for model mothers. 

The bachelor woman is an interesting illustration of 
Spencer's law of the inverse relation of individuation 
and genesis. The completely developed individual is 
always a terminal representative in her line of descent. 
She has taken up and utilized in her own life all that was 
meant for her descendants, and has so overdrawn her 
account with heredity that, like every perfectly and 
completely developed individual, she is also completely 
sterile. This is the very apotheosis of selfishness from the 

304 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

standpoint of every biological ethics. While the com- 
plete man can do and sometimes does this, woman has 
a far greater and very peculiar power of overdrawing her 
reserves. First she loses mammary functions, so that 
should she undertake maternity its functions are incom- 
pletely performed because she can not nurse, and this 
implies defective motherhood and leaves love of the 
child itself defective and maimed, for the mother who 
has never nursed can not love or be loved aright by her 
child. It crops out again in the abnormal or especially 
incomplete development of her offspring, in the critical 
years of adolescence, although they may have been health- 
ful before, and a less degree of it perhaps is seen in the 
diminishing families of cultivated mothers in the one- 
child system. These women are the intellectual equals and 
often the superiors of the men they meet ; they are very 
attractive as companions, like Miss Mehr, the university 
student, in Hauptmann 's ' ' Lonely Lives, ' ' who alienated 
the young husband from his noble wife; they enjoy all 
the keen pleasures of intellectual activity ; their very look, 
step, and bearing is free; their mentality makes them 
good fellows and companionable in all the broad intel- 
lectual spheres ; to converse with them is as charming and 
attractive for the best men as was Socrates 's discourse 
with the accomplished hetar^e ; they are at home with the 
racquet and on the golf links ; they are splendid friends ; 
their minds, in all their widening areas of contact, are 
as attractive as their bodies; and the world owes much 
and is likely to owe far more to high Platonic friendships 
of this kind. These women are often in every way mag- 
nificent, only they are not mothers, and sometimes have 
very little wifehood in them, and to attempt to marry 
them to develop these functions is one of the unique and 
too frequent tragedies of modern life and literature. 

305 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

Some, though by no means all, of them are functionally 
castrated; some actively deplore the necessity of child- 
bearing, and perhaps are parturition phobiacs, and abhor 
the limitations of married life ; they are incensed when- 
ever attention is called to the functions peculiar to their 
sex, and the careful consideration of problems of the 
monthly rest are thought ' ' not fit for cultivated women. ' ' 
The slow evolution of this type is probably inevitable 
as civilization advances, and their training is a noble 
function. Already it has produced minds of the great- 
est acumen who have made very valuable contributions 
to science, and far more is to be expected of them in the 
future. Indeed, it may be their noble function to lead 
their sex out into the higher, larger li»fe, and the deeper 
sense of its true position and function, for which I plead. 
Hitherto woman has not been able to solve her own 
problems. While she has been more religious than man, 
there have been few great women preachars; while she 
has excelled in teaching young children, there have been 
few Pestalozzis, or even Froebels ; while her invalidism is 
a complex problem, she has turned to man in her diseases. 
This is due to the very intuitiveness and naivete of her 
nature. But now that her world is so rapidly widening, 
she is in danger of losing her cue. She must be studied 
objectively and laboriously as we study children, and 
partly by men, because their sex must of necessity always 
remain objective and incommensurate with regard to 
woman, and therefore more or less theoretical. Again, in 
these days of intense new interest in feelings, emotions, 
and sentiments, when many a psychologist now envies 
and, like Schleiermacher, devoutly wishes he could be- 
come a woman, he can never really understand das Ewig- 
Weihliche,^ one of the two supreme oracles of guidance 

1 The eternal womanly. 

306 



THE EDUCATION OP GIRLS 

in life, because he is a man; and here the cultivated 
woman must explore the nature of her sex as man can 
not, and become its mouthpiece. In many of the new 
fields opening in biology since Darwin, in embryology, 
botany, the study of children, animals, savages (witness 
Miss Fletcher), sociological investigation, to say nothing 
of all the vast body of work that requires painstaking 
detail, perseverance, and conscience, woman has supe- 
rior ability, or her very sex gives her peculiar advan- 
tages where she is to lead and achieve great things in en- 
larging the kingdom of man. Perhaps, too, the present 
training of women may in the end develop those who 
shall one day attain a true self-knowledge and lead 
in the next step of devising a scheme that shall fit 
woman's nature and needs. 

For the slow evolution of such a scheme, we must first 
of all distinctly and ostensively invert the present maxim, 
and educate primarily and chiefly for motherhood, assum- 
ing that, if that does not come, single life can best take 
care of itself, because it is less intricate and lower and its 
needs far more easily met. While girls may be trained 
with boys, coeducation should cease at the dawn of ado- 
lescence, at least for a season. Great daily intimacy be- 
tween the sexes in high school, if not in college, tends to 
rub off the bloom and delicacy which can develop in each, 
and girls suffer in this respect, let us repeat, far more 
than boys. The familiar comradeship that ignores sex 
should be left to the agenic class. To the care of their 
institutions, we leave with pious and reverent hands the 
ideals inspired by characters like Hypatia, Madame de 
Stael, the Misses Cobb, Martineau, Fuller, Bronte, by 
George Eliot, George Sand, and Mrs. Browning; and 
while accepting and profiting by what they have done, 
and acknowledging every claim for their abilities and 

307 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

achievements, prospective mothers must not be allowed to 
forget a still larger class of ideal women, both in history 
and literature, from the Holy Mother to Beatrice 
Clotilda de Vaux, and all those who have inspired men 
to great deeds, and the choice and far richer anthology 
of noble mothers. 

We must premise, too, that she must not be petted or 
pampered with regimen or diet unsuited to her needs; 
left to find out as best she can, from surreptitious or 
unworthy sources, what she most of all needs to know; 
must recognize that our present civilization is hard on 
woman and that she is not yet adjusted to her social en- 
vironment; that as she was of old accused of having 
given man the apple of knowledge of good and evil, so 
he now is liable to a perhaps no less serious indictment 
of having given her the apple of intellectualism and 
encouraged her to assume his standards at the expense 
of health. We must recognize that riches are probably 
harder on her, on the whole, than poverty, and that 
poor parents should not labor too hard to exempt her 
from its wholesome discipline. The expectancy of 
change so stamped upon her sex by heredity as she ad- 
vances into maturity must not be perverted into uneasi- 
ness, or her soul sown with the tares of ambition or fired 
by intersexual competition and driven on, to quote Dr. 
R. T. Edes, " by a tireless sort of energy which is a 
compound of conscience, ambition, and desire to please, 
plus a peculiar female obstinacy. ' ' If she is bright, she 
must not be overworked in the school factory, studying 
in a way w^hich parodies Hood's " Song of the Shirt "; 
and if dull or feeble, she should not be worried by precep- 
tresses like an eminent lady principal,^ who thought 

1 Physical Hindrances to Teaching Girls, by Charlotte W. Porter, 
lorum, September, 1891, vol. 12, pp. 41-49. 

308 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

girls' weakness is usually imaginary or laziness, and that 
doctors are to blame for suggesting illness and for in- 
timating that men will have to choose between a healthy 
animal and an educated invalid for a wife. 

Without specifying here details or curricula, the 
ideals that should be striven toward in the intermediate 
and collegiate education of adolescent girls with the 
proper presupposition of motherhood, and which are 
already just as practicable as Abbotsholme ^ or L'Ecole 
des Eoches,^ may be rudely indicated somewhat as follows. 

First, the ideal institution for the training of girls 
from twelve or thirteen on into the twenties, when the 
period most favorable to motherhood begins, should be 
in the country in the midst of Hills, the climbing of 
which is the best stimulus for heart and lungs, and tends 
to mental elevation and breadth of view. There should 
be water for boating, bathing, and skating, aquaria and 
aquatic life; gardens both for kitchen vegetables and 
horticulture; forests for their seclusion and religious 
awe ; good roads, walks, and paths that tempt to walking 
and wheeling ; playgrounds and space for golf and tennis, 
with large covered but unheated space favorable for 
recreations in weather really too bad for out-of-door life 
and for those indisposed ; and plenty of nooks that permit 
each to be alone with nature, for this develops inward- 
ness, poise, and character, yet not too great remoteness 
from the city for a wise utilization of its advantages at 
intervals. All that can be called environment is even 
mxore important for girls than boys, significant as it is 
for the latter. 

1 Abbotsholme, 1889-1899: or Ten Years' Work in an Educational 
Laboratory, by Cecil Reddie. G. Allen, London, 1900. 

2 See L'Ecole des Roches, a School of the Twentieth Century, by 
T. R. Croswell. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 
479-491. 

309 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

The first aim, which should dominate every item, peda- 
gogic method and matter, should be health — a momen- 
tous word that looms up beside holiness, to which it is 
etymologically akin. The new hygiene of the last few 
years should be supreme and make these academic areas 
sacred to the cult of the goddess Hygeia. Only those 
who realize what advances have been made in health cul- 
ture and know something of its vast new literature can 
realize all that this means. The health of woman is, as 
we have seen, if possible even more important for the 
welfare of the race than that of man; and the influence 
of her body upon her mind is, in a sense, greater, so that 
its needs should be supreme and primary. Foods should 
favor the completest digestion, so that metabolism be 
on the highest plane. The dietary should be abundant, 
plain, and varied, and cooked with all the refinements 
possible in the modern cooking-school, which should be 
one of its departments, with limited use of rich foods or 
desserts and stimulating drinks, but with wholesome 
proximity to dairy and farm. Nutrition is the first law 
of health and happiness, the prime condition and creator 
of euphoria; and the appetite should be, as it always is 
if unperverted, like a kind of somatic conscience Stead- 
fastly pointing toward the true pole of needs. ^ 

Sleep should be regular, with a fixed retiring hour 
and curfew, on plain beds in rooms of scrupulous neat- 
ness reserved chiefly for it with every precaution for 
quiet, and, if possible, with windows more or less open the 
year round, and, like other rooms, never overheated. 
Bathing in moderation, and especially dress and toilet 
should be almost raised to fine arts and objects of con- 
stant suggestion. Each student should have three rooms, 
for bath, sleep, and study, respectively, and be responsi- 
ble for their care, with every encouragement for^express- 

310 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

ing individual tastes, but with an all-dominant idea of 
simplicity, convenience, refinement, and elegance, with- 
out luxury. Girls need to go away from home a good 
part of every year to escape the indiscretion and often 
the coddling of parents and to learn self-reliance ; and a 
family dormitory system, with but few, twelve to twenty, 
in each building, to escape nervous wear and distraction, 
to secure intimacy and acquaintance with one or more 
matrons or teachers and to ensure the most pedagogic 
dietetics, is suggested. 

Exercise comes after regimen, of which it is a special 
reform. Swedish gymnastics should be abandoned or re- 
duced to a minimum of best points, because it is too 
severe and, in forbidding music, lays too little stress upon 
the rhythm element. Out-of-door walks and games 
should have precedence over all else. The principle 
sometimes advocated, that methods of physical training 
should apply to both boys and girls without regard to 
sex, and with all the ordinary appliances found in the 
men 's gymnasia introduced, should be reversed and every 
possible adjustment made to sex. Free plays and games 
should always have precedence over indoor or uniform 
commando exercises. Boating and basket-ball should be 
allowed, but with the competition element sedulously re- 
duced, and with dancing of many kinds and forms the 
most prominent of indoor exercises. The dance cadences 
the soul ; the stately minuet gives poise ; the figure dances 
train the mind; and pantomime and dramatic features 
should be introduced and even specialties, if there are 
strong individual predispositions. The history of the 
dance, w^hieh has often been a mode of worship, a school 
of morals, and which is the root of the best that is in 
the drama, the best of all exercises and that could be 
again the heart of our whole educational system, should 
21 311 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

be exploited, and the dancing school and class rescued 
from its present degradation. No girl is educated who 
can not dance, although she need not know the ballroom 
in its modern form.^ 

Manners, a word too often relegated to the past as 
savoring of the primness of the ancient dame school or 
female seminary, are really minor or sometimes major 
morals. They can express everything in the whole range 
of the impulsive or emotional life. Now that we under- 
stand the primacy of movement over feeling, we can ap- 
preciate what a school of bearing and repose in daily con- 
verse with others means. I would revive some of the 
ancient casuistry of details, but less the rules of the draw- 
ing-room, call and party, although these should not be 
neglected, than the deeper expressions of true ladyhood 
seen in an exquisite, tender and unselfish regard for the 
feelings of others. Women's ideal of compelling every 
one whom they meet to like them is a noble one, and the 
control of every automatism is not only a part of good 
breeding, but nervous health. 

Eegularity should be another all-pervading norm. In 
the main, even though he may have " played his sex 
symphony too harshly," E. H. Clark was right. Perio- 
dicity, perhaps the deepest law of the cosmos, celebrates 
its highest triumphs in woman's life. For years every- 
thing must give way to its thorough and settled estab- 
lishment. In the monthly Sabbaths of rest, the ideal 
school should revert to the meaning of the word leisure. 
The paradise of stated rest should be revisited, idleness 
be actively cultivated ; reverie, in which the soul, which 
needs these seasons of withdrawal for its own develop- 
ment, expatiates over the whole life of the race, should 
be provided for and encouraged in every legitimate way, 

^ See p. 88. 

312 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

for, in rest, the whole momentum of heredity is felt in 
ways most favorable to full and complete development. 
Then woman should realize that to he is greater than 
to do ; should step reverently aside from her daily routine 
and let Lord Nature work. In this time of sensitiveness 
and perturbation, when anemia and chlorosis are so 
peculiarly immanent to her sex, remission of toil should 
not only be permitted, but required ; and yet the greatest 
individual liberty should be allowed to adjust itself to the 
vast diversities of individual constitutional needs. (See 
Chapter VII on this point.) The cottage home, which 
should take the place of the dormitory, should always 
have special interest and attractions for these seasons. 

There should always be some personal instruction at 
these seasons during earlier adolescent years. I have 
glanced over nearly a score of books and pamphlets that 
are especially written for girls ; while all are well meant 
and far better than the ordinary modes by which girls 
acquire knowledge of their own nature if left to them- 
selves, they are, like books for boys, far too prolix, and 
most are too scientific and plain and direct. Moreover, no 
two girls need just the same instruction, and to leave it 
to reading is too indirect and causes the mind to dwell 
on it for too long periods. Best of all is individual in- 
struction at the time, concise, practical, and never, es- 
pecially in the early years, without a certain mystic and 
religious tone which should pervade all and make every- 
thing sacred. This should not be given by male phy- 
sicians — and indeed most female doctors would make 
it too professional, and the maiden teacher must forever 
lack reverence for it — but it should come from one whose 
soul and body are full of wifehood and motherhood and 
who is old enough to know and is not without the neces- 
sary technical knowledge. 

313 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

Another principle should be to broaden by retarding ; 
to keep the purely mental back and by every method to 
bring the intuitions to the front; appeals to tact and 
taste should be incessant; a purely intellectual man is 
no doubt biologically a deformity, but a purely intel- 
lectual woman is far more so. Bookishness is probably 
a bad sign in a girl; it suggests artificiality, pedantry, 
the lugging of dead knowledge. Mere learning is not 
the ideal, and prodigies of scholarship are always morbid. 
The rule should be to keep nothing that is not to become 
practical; to open no brain tracts which are not to be 
highways for the daily traffic of thought and conduct ; not 
to overburden the soul with the impedimenta of libraries 
and records of what is afar off in time or zest, and always 
to follow truly the guidance of normal and spontaneous 
interests wisely interpreted. 

Religion will always hold as prominent a place in 
woman's life as politics does in man's, and adolescence is 
still more its seedtime with girls than with boys. Its 
roots are the sentiment of awe and reverence, and it is 
the great agent in the world for transforming life from 
its earlier selfish to its only really mature form of altru- 
ism. The tales of the heroes of virtue, duty, devotion, 
and self-sacrifice from the Old Testament come naturally 
first; then perhaps the prophets paraphrased as in the 
pedagogic triumph of Kent and Saunders 's little series ; 
and when adolescence is at its height then the chief stress 
of religious instruction should be laid upon Jesus 's life 
and work. He should be taught first humanly, and only 
later when the limitations of manhood seem exhausted 
should His Deity be adduced as a welcome surplusage. 
The supernatural is a reflex of the heart; each sustains 
and neither can exist without the other. If the trans- 
cendent and supernal had no objective existence, we 

314 



A 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

should have to invent and teach it or dwarf the life 
of feeling and sentiment. Whatever else religion is, 
therefore, it is the supremest poetry of the soul, 
reflecting like nothing else all that is deepest, most 
generic and racial in it. Theology should be re- 
duced to a minimum, but nothing denied where wanted. 
Paul and his works and ways should be for the 
most part deferred until after eighteen. The juvenile 
as well as the cyclone revivalist should be very care- 
fully excluded; and yet in every springtime, when na- 
ture is recreated, service and teaching should gently en- 
courage the revival and even the regeneration of all the 
religious instincts. The mission recruiter should be al- 
lowed to do his work outside these halls, and everything 
in the way of infection and all that brings religion into 
conflict with good taste and good sense should be ex- 
cluded, while esthetics should supplement, reenforce, and 
go hand in hand with piety. Religion is in its infancy; 
and woman, who has sustained it in the past, must be the 
chief agent in its further and higher development. Ortho- 
doxies and all narrowness should forever give place to 
cordial hospitality toward every serious view, which 
should be met by the method of greater sympathy rather 
than by that of criticism. 

Nature in her many phases should, of course, make 
up a large part of the entire curriculum, but here 
again the methods of the sexes should differ some- 
what after puberty. The poetic and mythic factors 
and some glimpses of the history of science should 
be given more prominence; the field naturalist rather 
than the laboratory man of technic should be the 
ideal especially at first; nature should be taught as God's 
first revelation, as an Old Testament related to the Bible 
as a primordial dispensation to a later and clearer and 

315 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

more special one. Reverence and love should be the 
motive powers, and no aspect should be studied without 
beginning and culminating in interests akin to devotion. 
Mathematics should be taught only in its rudiments, and 
those with special talents or tastes for it should go to 
agamic schools. Chemistry, too, although not excluded, 
should have a subordinate place. The average girl has 
little love of sozzling and mussing with the elements, and 
cooking involves problems in organic chemistry too com- 
plex to be understood very profoundly, but the rudiments 
of household chemistry should be taught. Physics, too, 
should be kept to elementary stages. Meteorology should 
have a larger, and geology and astronomy increasingly 
larger places, and are especially valuable because, and 
largely in proportion as, they are taught out of doors, 
but the general principles and the untechnical and practi- 
cal aspects should be kept in the foreground. With 
botany more serious work should be done. Plant-lore 
and the poetic aspect, as in astronomy, should have at- 
tention throughout, while Latin nomenclature and mi- 
croscopic technic should come late if at all, and vulgar 
names should have precedence over Latin terminology. 
Flowers, gardening, and excursions should never be 
wanting. Economic and even medical aspects should ap- 
pear, and prominent and early should come the whole 
matter of self cross-fertilization and that by insects. The 
moral value of this subject will never be fully understood 
till we have what might almost be called a woman's 
botany, constructed on lines different from any of the 
text-books I have glanced at. Here much knowledge in- 
teresting in itself can be early taught, which will spring 
up into a world of serviceable insights as adolescence 
develops and the great law of sex unfolds. 

Zoology should always be taught with plenty of pets, 
316 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

menagerie resources, and with aquaria, aviaries, apiaries, 
formicaries, etc., as adjuncts. It should start in the 
environment like everything else. Bird and animal lore, 
books, and pictures should abound in the early stages, 
and the very prolific chapter of instincts should have 
ample illustration, while the morphological nomenclature 
and details of structure should be less essential. Woman 
has domesticated nearly all the animals, and is so superior 
to man in insight into their modes of life and psychoses 
that many of them are almost exemplifications of moral 
qualities to her even more than to man. The peacock is 
an embodied expression of pride; the pig, of filth; the 
fox, of cunning ; the serpent, of subtle danger ; the eagle, 
of sublimity ; the goose, of stupidity ; and so on through 
all the range of human qualities, as we have seen. At bot- 
tom, however, the study of animal life is coming to be 
more and more a problem of heredity, and its problems 
should have dominant position and to them the other 
matter should grade up. 

This shades over into and prepares for the study of 
the primitive man and child so closely related to each 
other. The myth, custom, belief, domestic practises of 
savages, vegetative and animal traits in infancy and 
childhood, the development of which is a priceless boon 
for the higher education of women, open of themselves 
a great field of human interest where she needs to know 
the great results, the striking details, the salient illustra- 
tions, the basal principles rather than to be entangled 
in the details of anthropometry, craniometry, philol- 
ogy, etc. 

All this lays the basis for a larger study of modern 
man — history, with the biographical element very promi- 
nent throughout, with plenty of stories of heroes of 
virtue^ acts of valor, tales of saintly lives and the personal 

317 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

element more prominent, and specialization in the study 
of dynasties, wars, authorities, and controversies relegated 
to a very subordinate place. Sociology, undeveloped, 
rudimentary, and in some places suspected as it is, should 
have in the curriculum of her higher education a place 
above political economy. The stories of the great re- 
forms, and accounts of the constitution of society, of the 
home, church, state, and school, and philanthropies and 
ideals, should come to the fore. 

Art in all its forms should be opened at least in a 
propaedeutic way and individual tastes amply and 
judiciously fed, but there should be no special training 
in music without some taste and gift, and the aim should 
be to develop critical and discriminative appreciation and 
the good taste that sees the vast superiority of all that is 
good and classic over what is cheap and fustian. 

In literature, myth, poetry, and drama should perhaps 
lead, and the knowledge of the great authors in the ver- 
nacular be fostered. Greek, Hebrew, and perhaps Latin 
languages should be entirely excluded, not but that they 
are of great value and have their place, but because a 
smattering knowledge is bought at too high a price of ig- 
norance of more valuable things. German, French, and 
Italian should be allowed and provided for by native 
teachers and by conversational methods if desired, and 
in their proper season. 

In the studies of the soul of man, generally called the 
philosophic branches, metaphysics and epistemology 
should have the smallest, and logic the next least place. 
Psychology should be taught on the genetic basis of ani- 
mals and children, and one of its tap-roots should be 
developed from the love of infancy and youth, than 
which nothing in all the world is more worthy. If a 
woman Descartes ever arises, she will put life before 

318 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

theory, and her watchword will be not cogito, ergo sum,'^ 
but sum, ergo cogito.^ The psychology of sentiments 
and feelings and intuitions will take precedence of that 
of pure intellect ; ethics will be taught on the basis of the 
whole series of practical duties and problems, and the 
theories of the ultimate nature of right or the constitu- 
tion of conscience will have small place. 

Domesticity will be taught by example in some ideal 
home building by a kind of laboratory method. A 
nursery with all carefully selected appliances and ad- 
juncts, a dining-room, a kitchen, bedroom, closets, cellars, 
outhouses, building, its material, the grounds, lawn, 
shrubbery, hothouse, library, and all the other adjuncts 
of the hearth will be both exemplified and taught. A 
general course in pedagogy, especially its history and 
ideals, another in child study, and finally a course in 
maternity the last year taught broadly, and not without 
practical details of nursing, should be comprehensive and 
culminating. In its largest sense maternity might be the 
heart of all the higher training of young women. 

Applied knowledge will thus be brought to a focus in 
a department of teaching as one of the specialties of 
motherhood and not as a vocation apart. The training 
should aim to develop power of maternity in soul as well 
as in body, so that home influence may extend on and up 
through the plastic years of pubescence, and future gen- 
erations shall not rebel against these influences until they 
have wrought their perfect work. 

The methods throughout should be objective, with 
copious illustrations by way of object-lessons, apparatus, 
charts, pictures, diagrams, and lectures, far less book 
work and recitation, only a limited amount of room study, 

1 1 think, therefore I am. 2 1 am, therefore I think. 

319 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

the function of examination reduced to a minimum, 
and everything as suggestive and germinal as possible. 
Hints that are not followed up ; information not elab- 
orated into a thin pedagogic sillabub or froth ; seed that is 
sown on the waters with no thought of reaping ; faith in 
a God who does not pay at the end of each week, month, 
or year, but who always pays abundantly some time; 
training which does not develop hypertrophied memory- 
pouches that carry, or creative powers that discover and 
produce — these are lines on which such an institution 
should develop. Specialization has its place, but it al- 
ways hurts a woman's soul more than a man's, should 
always come later, and if there is special capacity it 
should be trained elsewhere. Unconscious education is 
a power of which we have yet to learn the full ranges. 

In most groups in this series of ideal departments 
there should be at least one healthful, wise, large-souled, 
honorable, married and attractive man, and, if possible, 
several of them. His very presence in an institution for 
young women gives poise, polarizes the soul, and gives 
wholesome but long-circuited tension at root no doubt 
sexual, but all unconsciously so. This mentor should 
not be more father than brother, though he should com- 
bine the best of each, but should add another element. 
He need not be a doctor, a clergyman, or even a great 
scholar, but should be accessible for confidential con- 
ferences even though intimate. He should know the 
soul of the adolescent girl and how to prescribe; he 
should be wise and fruitful in advice, but especially 
should be to all a source of contagion and inspiration 
for poise and courage even though religious or medical 
problems be involved. But even if he lack all these 
latter qualities, though he be so poised that impulsive 
girls can turn their hearts inside out in his presence 

320 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

and perhaps even weep on his shoulder, the presence of 
such a being, though a complete realization of this ideal 
could be only remotely approximated, would be the center 
of an atmosphere most wholesomely tonic. 

In these all too meager outlines I have sketched a 
humanistic and liberal education and have refrained 
from all details and special curriculization. Many of 
the above features I believe would be as helpful for 
boys as for girls, but woman has here an opportunity to 
resume her exalted and supreme position, to be the first 
in this higher field, to lead man and pay her debt to 
his educational institutions, by resuming her crown. 
The ideal institutions, however, for the two will always 
be radically and probably always increasingly divergent. 

As a psychologist, penetrated with the growing sense 
of the predominance of the heart over the mere in- 
tellect, I believe myself not alone in desiring to make 
a tender declaration of being more and more pas- 
sionately in love with woman as I conceive she came 
from the hand of God. I keenly envy my Catholic 
friends their Maryolatry. Who ever asked if the Holy 
Mother, whom the wise men adored, knew the astronomy 
of the Chaldees or had studied Egyptian or Babylonian, 
or even whether she knew how to read or write her own 
tongue, and who has ever thought of caring^ We can 
not conceive that she bemoaned any limitations of her 
sex, but she has been an object of adoration all these 
centuries because she glorified womanhood by being 
more generic, nearer the race, and richer in love, pity, 
unselfish devotion and intuition than man. The glori- 
fied madonna ideal shows us how much more whole and 
holy it is to be a woman than to be artist, orator, pro- 
fessor, or expert, and suggests to our own sex that to be 

321 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

a man is larger than to be gentleman, philosopher, gen- 
eral, president, or millionaire. 

But with all this love and hunger in my heart, I can 
not help sharing in the growing fear that modern 
woman, at least in more ways and places than one, is 
in danger of declining from her orbit; that she is com- 
ing to lack just confidence and pride in her sex as such, 
and is just now in danger of lapsing to mannish ways, 
methods, and ideals, until her original divinity may 
become obscured. But if our worship at her shrine is 
with a love and adoration a little qualified and unsteady, 
we have a fixed and abiding faith without which we 
should have no resource against pessimism for the future 
of our race, that she will ere long evolve a sphere of 
life and even education which fits her needs as well as, 
if not better than, those of man fit his. 

Meanwhile, if the eternally womanly seems somewhat 
less divine, we can turn with unabated faith to the 
eternally childlike, the best of which in each are so 
closely related. The oracles of infancy and childhood 
will never fail. Distracted as we are in the maze of 
new sciences, skills, ideals, knowledges that we can not 
fully coordinate by our logic or curriculize by our 
pedagogy; confused between the claims of old and new 
methods; needing desperately, for survival as a nation 
and a race, some clue to thrid the mazes of the manifold 
modern cultures, we have now at least one source to 
which we can turn — we have found the only magnet in 
all the universe that points steadfastly to the undis- 
covered pole of human destiny. We know what can 
and will ultimately coordinate in the generic, w^hich is 
larger than the logical order, all that is worth know- 
ing, teaching, or doing by the best methods, that will 
save us from misfits and the waste ineffable of premature 

322 



THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 

and belated knowledge, and that is in the interests and 
line of normal development in the child in our midst 
that must henceforth ever lead us; which epitomizes 
in its development all the stages, human and prehuman ; 
that is the proper object of all that strange new love 
of everything that is naive, spontaneous, and unsophis- 
ticated in human nature. The heart and soul of grow- 
ing childhood is the criterion by which we judge the 
larger heart and soul of mature womanhood; and these 
are ultimately the only guide into the heart of the new 
education which is to be, when the school becomes what 
Melanchthon said it must be — a true workshop of the 
Holy Ghost — and what the new psychology, when it 
rises to the heights of prophecy, foresees as the true para- 
dise of restored intuitive human nature. 



323 



CHAPTER XII 

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

Dangers of muscular degeneration and overstimulus of brain — Difficulties 
in teaching morals — Methods in Europe — Obedience to commands — 
Good habits should be mechanized — Value of scolding — How to flog 
aright — Its dangers — Moral precepts and proverbs — Habituation — 
Training will through intellect — Examinations — Concentration — 
Originality — Froebel and the naive — First ideas of God — Conscience 
— Importance of Old and New Testaments — Sex dangers — Love and 
religion — Conversion. 

From its nature as well as from its central impor- 
tance it might be easily shown that the will is no less 
dependent on the culture it receives than is the mind. It 
is fast becoming as absurd to suppose that men can sur- 
vive in the great practical strain to which American life 
subjects all who would succeed, if the will is left to take 
its doubtful chances of training and discipline, as to 
suppose that the mind develops in neglect. Our changed 
conditions make this chance of will-culture more doubt- 
ful than formerly. A generation or two ago ^ most 
school-boys had either farm work, chores, errands, jobs 
self-imposed, or required by less tender parents; they 
made things, either toys or tools, out of school. Most 
school-girls did house-work, more or less of which is, 
like farm-work, perhaps the most varied and most 
salutary as well as most venerable of all schools for the 
youthful body and mind. They undertook extensive 

i See author's Boy Life in a Massachusetts Country Town Forty Years 
Ago, Pedagogical Seminary. June, 1906, vol. 13, pp. 192-207. 

324 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

works of embroidery, bed-quilting, knitting, sewing, 
mending, if not cleaning, and even spinning and weav- 
ing their own or others' clothing, and cared for the 
younger children. The wealthier devised or imposed 
tasks for will-culture, as the German Kaiser has 
his children taught a trade as part of their education. 
Ten days at the hoe-handle, axe, or pitchfork, said an 
eminent educator lately in substance, with no new im- 
pression from without, and one constant and only duty, 
is a schooling in perseverance and sustained effort such 
as few boys now get in any shape ; while city instead of 
country life brings so many new, heterogeneous and 
distracting impressions of motion rather than rest, and 
so many privileges with so few corresponding duties, 
that with artificial life and bad air the will is weakened, 
and eupeptic minds and stomachs, on which its vigor so 
depends, are rare. Machines supersede muscles, and 
perhaps our athleticism gives skill too great preponder- 
ance over strength, or favors intense rather than con- 
stant, long-sustained, unintermittent energy. Perhaps 
too many of our courses of study are better fitted to 
turn out many-sided but superficial paragraphists, than 
men who can lay deep plans, and subordinate many com- 
plex means to one remote end. Meanwhile, if there is 
any one thing of which our industries and practical arts 
are in more crying need than another, it is the old- 
fashioned virtue of thoroughness, of a kind and degree 
which does not address merely the eye, is not limited 
by the letter of a contract, but which has some regard 
for its products for their own sake, and some sense for 
the future. Whether in science, philosophy, morals, or 
business, the fields for long-ranged cumulative efforts 
are wider, more numerous, and far more needy than in 
the days when it was the fashion for men contentedly 

325 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

to concentrate themselves to one vocation, life-work, or 
mission, or when cathedrals or other yet vaster public 
works were transmitted, unfinished but ever advancing, 
from one generation of men to another. 

It is because the brain is developed, while the muscles 
are allowed to grow flabby and atrophied, that the de- 
plored chasm between knowing and doing is so often 
fatal to the practical effectiveness of mental and moral 
culture. The great increase of city and sedentary life 
has been far too sudden for the human body — ^which was 
developed by hunting, war, agriculture, and manifold 
industries now given over to steam and machinery — 
to adapt itself healthfully or naturally to its new en- 
vironment. Let any of us take down an anatomical 
chart of the human muscles, and reflect what movements 
we habitually make each day, and realize how dispro- 
portionately our activities are distributed compared 
with the size or importance of the muscles, and how 
greatly modern specialization of work has deformed our 
bodies. The muscles that move the scribbling pen are 
an insignificant fraction of those in the whole body, 
and those that wag the tongue and adjust the larynx 
are also comparatively few and small. Their importance 
is, of course, not underrated, but it is disastrous to con- 
centrate education upon them too exclusively or too early 
in life. The trouble is that few realize what physical 
vigor is in man or woman, or how dangerously near 
weakness often is to wickedness, how impossible health- 
ful energy of will is without strong muscles which are 
its organ, or how endurance and self-control, no less than 
great achievement, depend on muscle-habits. Both in 
Germany and Greece, a golden age of letters was pre- 
ceded, by about a generation, by a golden age of na- 
tional gymnastic enthusiasm which constitutes, espe- 

326 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

eially in the former country, one of the most unique and 
suggestive chapters in the history of pedagogy. Sym- 
metry and grace, hardihood and courage, the power to 
do everything that the human body can do with and 
without all conceivable apparatus, instruments, and even 
tools, are culture ideals that in Greece, Rome, and 
Germany respectively have influenced, as they might 
again influence, young men, as intellectual ideals never 
can do save in a select few. We do not want ' ' will- vir- 
tuosos, ' ' who perform feats hard to learn, but then easy 
to do and good for show; nor spurtiness of any sort 
which develops an erethic habit of work, temper, and 
circulation, and is favored by some of our popular 
sports but too soon reacts into fatigue. Even will- 
training does not reach its end till it leads the young 
up to taking an intelligent, serious and life-long in- 
terest in their own physical culture and development. 
This is higher than interest in success in school or col- 
lege sport; and, though naturally later than these, is 
one of the earliest forms of will-culture in which it is 
safe and wise to attempt to interest the young for its 
own sake alone. In our exciting life and trying climate, 
in which the experiment of civilization has never been 
tried before, these thoughts are merely exercises. 

But this is, of course, preliminary. Great as is the 
need, the practical difficulties in the way are very great. 
First, there are not only no good text-books in ethics, 
but no good manual to guide teachers. Some give so 
many virtues or good habits to be taught per term, 
ignoring the unity of virtue as well as the order in 
which the child's capacities for real virtue unfold. Ad- 
vanced text-books discuss the grounds of obligation, the 
nature of choice or freedom, or the hedonistic calculus, 
as if pleasures and pains could be balanced as measur- 
22 327 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

able quantities, etc., so that philosophic morality is 
clearly not for children or teachers. Secondly, evolu- 
tion encourages too often the doubt whether virtue can 
be taug-ht, when it should have the opposite effect. Per- 
versity and viciousness of will are too often treated as 
constitutional disease; and insubordination or obstinacy, 
especially in school, are secretly admired as strength, 
instead of being vigorously treated as crampy disorders 
of will, and the child is coddled into flaccidity. Because 
the lowest develops first, there is danger that it will 
interfere with the development of the higher, and thus, 
if left to his own, the child may come to have no will. 
The third and greatest difficulty is, that with the best 
effort to do so, so few teachers can separate morality 
from religious creed. So vital is the religious sentiment 
here that it is hard to divorce the end of education from 
the end of life, proximate from ultimate grounds of 
obligation, or finite from infinite duties. Those whose 
training has been more religious than ethical can hardly 
teach morality per se satisfactorily to the noli me 
tangere ^ spirit of denominational freedom so wisely jeal- 
ous of conflicting standards and sanctions for the young. 

How then can we ever hope to secure proper training 
for the wilH 

More than a generation ago Germany developed the 
following method: Children of Lutheran, Catholic and 
Jewish parentage, which include most German children, 
were allowed one afternoon a week for several years, 
and two afternoons a week for a few months preceding 
confirmation, to spend half of a school day with in- 
structors of these respective professions, who were nom- 
inated by the church, but examined by the state as to 

1 Touch me not. 

328 



i 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

their competence. These teachers are as professional, 
therefore, as those in the regular class work. Each re- 
ligion is allowed to determine its own course of re- 
ligious instruction, subject only to the approval of the 
cultus minister or the local authorities. In this way a 
rupture between the religious sentiments and teaching 
of successive generations is avoided and it is sought to 
bring religious training to bear upon morals. These 
classes learn Scripture, hymns, church service, — the Cath- 
olics in Latin and the Jewish in Hebrew, — the history of 
their church and people, and sometimes a little sys- 
tematic theology. In some of these schools there are 
prizes and diplomas, and the spirit of competition is 
appealed to. A criticism sometimes made against them, 
especially against the Lutheran religious pedagogy, is 
that it is too intellectual. It is, of course, far more 
systematic and effective from this point of view than 
the American Sunday School, so that whatever may be 
said of its edifying effects, the German child knows 
these topics far better than the American. This system, 
with modifications, has been adopted in some places in 
France, England and in America, more often in private 
than in public schools, however. 

The other system originated in France some years 
after the Franco-Prussian War when the clerical in- 
fluence in French education gave way to the lay and 
secular spirit. In these classes, for which also stated 
times are set apart and which are continued through 
all the required grades under the name of moral and 
civic instruction, the religious element is entirely ab- 
sent, except that there are a few hymns, Bible passages 
and stories which all agree upon as valuable. Most of the 
course is made up of carefully selected maxims and 
especially stories of virtue, records of heroic achieve- 

329 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

ments in French history and even in literature and the 
drama. Everything, however, has a distinct moral les- 
son, although that lesson is not made offensively 
prominent. We have here nearly a score of these text- 
books, large and small. It would seem as though the 
resources of the French records and literature had been 
ransacked, and indeed many deeds of heroism are culled 
from the daily press. The matter is often arranged 
under headings such as cleanliness, acts of kindness, 
courage, truthfulness versus lying; respect for age, good 
manners, etc. Each virtue is thus taught in a way 
appropriate to each stage of childhood, and quite often 
bands of mercy, rescue leagues and other societies are 
the outgrowth of this instruction. It is, of course, ex- 
posed to much criticism from the clergy on the cogent 
ground that morality needs the support of religion, 
at the very least, in childhood. This system has had 
much influence in England where several similar courses 
have been evolved, and in this country we have at 
least one very praiseworthy effort in this direction, ad- 
dressed mainly, however, to older children. 

Besides this, two ways suggest themselves. First, 
we may try to assume, or tediously enucleate a consensus 
of religious truth as a basis of will training, e. g., God 
and immortality, and, ignoring the minority who doubt 
these, vote them into the public school. Pedagogy need 
have nothing whatever to say respecting the absolute 
truth or falsity of these ideas, but there is little doubt 
that they have an influence on the will, at a certain stage 
of average development, greater and more essential than 
any other ; so great that even were their vitality to decay 
like the faith in the Greek or German mythology, we 
should still have to teach God and a future life as the 
most imperative of all hypotheses in a field where, as 

330 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

in morals, nothing is so practical as a good theory ; and 
we should have to fall to teaching the Bible as a moral 
classic, and cultivate a critical sympathy for its view 
of life. But this way ignores revelation and super- 
natural claims, while some have other objections to 
emancipating or " rescuing " the Bible from theology 
just yet. Indeed, the problem how to teach anything 
that the mind could not have found out for itself, but 
that had to be revealed, has not been solved by modern 
pedagogy, which, since Pestalozzi, has been more and 
more devoted to natural and developing methods. The 
latter teaches that there must not be too much seed 
sown, too much or too high precept, or too much itera- 
tion, and that, in Jean Paul's phrase, the hammer must 
not rest on bell, but only tap and rebound, to bring 
out a clear tone. Again, a consensus of this content 
would either have to be carefully defined and would 
be too generic and abstract for school uses, or else 
differences of interpretation, which so pervade and 
are modified by character, culture, temperament, and 
feeling, would make the consensus itself nugatory. Re- 
ligious training must be specific at first, and, omitting 
qualifications, the more explicit the denominational faith 
the earlier may religious motives affect the will. 

This is the way of our hopes, to the closer considera- 
tion of which we intend to return in the future, though 
it must be expected that the happiest consensus will be 
long quarantined from most schools. Meanwhile a sec- 
ond way, however unpromising, is still open. Noble 
types of character may rest on only the native instincts 
of the soul or even on broadly interpreted utilitarian 
considerations. But if morality without religion were 
only a bloodless corpse or a plank in a shipwreck, there 
is now need enough for teachers to study its form, drift, 

331 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

and uses by itself alone. This, at least, is our purpose in 
considering the will, and this only. 

The will, purpose, and even mood of small children 
when alone, are fickle, fluctuating, contradictory. Our 
very presence imposes one general law on them, viz., that 
of keeping our good will and avoiding our displeasure. 
As the plant grows towards the light, so they unfold in 
the direction of our wishes, felt as by divination. They 
respect all you smile at, even buffoonery; look up in 
their play to call your notice, to study the lines of your 
sympathy, as if their chief vocation was to learn your 
desires. Their early lies are often saying what they 
think will please us, knowing no higher touchstones of 
truth. If we are careful to be wisely and without excess 
happy and affectionate when they are good, and sad- 
dened and slightly cooled in manifestations of love if 
they do wrong, the power of association in the normal, 
eupeptic child will early choose right as surely as pleas- 
ure increases vitality. If our love is deep, obedience 
is an instinct if not a religion. The child learns that 
while it can not excite our fear, resentment or admira- 
tion, etc., it can act on our love, and this should be 
the first sense of its own efficiency. Thus, too, it first 
learns that the way of passion and impulse is not the 
only rule of life, and that something is gained by re- 
sisting them. It imitates our acts long before it can 
understand our words. As if it felt its insignificance, 
and dreaded to be arrested in some lower phase of its 
development, its instinct for obedience becomes almost 
a passion. As the vine must twine or grovel, so the 
child comes unconsciously to worship idols, and imi- 
tates bad patterns and examples in the absence of worthy 
ones. He obeys as with a deep sense of being our 
chattel, and, at bottom, admires those who coerce him, 

332 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

if the means be wisely chosen. The authority must, of 
course, be ascendancy over heart and mind. The more 
absolute such authority the more the will is saved from 
caprice and feels the power of steadiness. Such author- 
ity excites the unique, unfathomable sense of reverence, 
w^hich measures the capacity for will-culture, and is the 
strongest and soundest of all moral motives. It is also 
the most comprehensive, for it is first felt only towards 
persons, and personality is a bond, enabling any num- 
ber of complex elements to act or be treated as a 
whole, as everything does and is in the child's soul, 
instead of in isolation and detail. In the feeling of 
respect culminating in worship almost all educational 
motives are involved, but especially those which alone 
can bring the will to maturity; and happy the child 
who is bound by the mysterious and constraining sym- 
pathy of dependence, by which, if unblighted by 
cynicism, a worthy mentor directs and lifts the will. 
This unconscious reflection of our character and wishes 
is the diviner side of childhood, by which it is quick 
and responsive to everything in its moral environment. 
The child may not be able to tell whether its teacher 
often smiles, dresses in this way or that, speaks loud or 
low, has many rules or not, though every element 
of her personality affects him profoundly. His acts of 
will have not been choices, but a mass of psychic causes 
far greater than consciousness can estimate have laid 
a basis of character, than which heredity alone is 
deeper, before the child knows he has a will. These 
influences are not transient but life-long, for if the 
conscious and intentional may anywhere be said to be 
only a superficial wave over the depths of the uncon- 
scious, it is in the sphere of will-culture. 

But command and obedience must also be specific 
333 



YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

to supplant nature. Here begins the difficulty. A 
young child can know no general commands. "' Sit in 
your chair," means sit a moment, as a sort of trick, 
with no prohibition to stand the next instant. Any just- 
forbidden act may be done in the next room. All is 
here and now, and patient reiteration, till habit is 
formed, and no havoc-making rules which it cannot 
understand or remember, is our cue. Obedience can, 
however, be instinct even here, and is its chief virtue, 
and there is no more fear of weakening the will by it 
than in the case of soldiers. As the child grows older, 
however, and as the acts commanded are repugnant, 
or unusual, there should be increasing care, lest author- 
ity be compromised, sympathy ruptured, or lest mutual 
timidity and indecision, if not mutual insincerity and 
dissimulation, as well as parodied disobedience, etc., to 
test us, result. We should, of course, watch for favor- 
able moods, assume no unwonted or preternatural 
dignity or owlish air of wisdom, and command in a low 
voice which does not too rudely break in upon the 
child's train of impressions. The acts we command or 
forbid should be very few at first, but inexorable. We 
should be careful not to forbid where we cannot fol- 
low an untrusty child, or what we can not prevent. 
Our own will should be a rock and not a wave. Our 
requirements should be uniform, with no whim, mood, 
or periodicity of any sort about them. If we alternate 
from caresses to severity, are fickle and capricious in- 
stead of commanding by a fixed and settled plan, if 
we only now and then take the child in hand, so he 
does not know precisely what to expect, we really re- 
quire the child to change its nature with every change 
in us, and well for the child who can defy such a 
changeable authority, which not only unsettles but 

334 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

breaks up character anew when it is just at the beginning 
of the formative period. Neglect is better than this, and 
fear of inconsistency of authority makes the best parents 
often jealous of arbitrariness in teachers. Only thus can 
we develop general habits of will and bring the child to 
know general maxims of conduct inductively, and only 
thus by judicious boldness and hardihood in command 
can we bring the child to feel the conscious strength that 
comes only from doing unpleasant things. Even if in- 
stant obedience be only external at first, it will work 
inward, for moods are controlled by work, and it is 
only will which enlarges the bounds of personality. 

Yet we must not forget that even morality is rela- 
tive, and is one thing for adults and often quite an- 
other for children. The child knows nothing of absolute 
truth, justice, or virtues. The various stimuli of dis- 
cipline are to enforce the higher though weaker in- 
sights which the child has already unfolded, rather than 
to engraft entirely unintuited good. The command must 
find some ally, feeble though it be, in the child's owij 
soul. We should strive to fill each moment with as little 
sacrifice or subordination, as mere means or conditions 
to the future, as possible, for fear of affectation and 
insincerity. But yet the hardier and sounder the nature, 
the more we may address training to barely nascent in- 
tuitions, with a less ingredient of immediate satisfaction, 
and the deeper the higher element of interest will be 
grounded in the end. The child must find as he ad- 
vances towards maturity, that every new insight or 
realization of his own reveals the fact that you have 
been there before with commands, cultivating sentiments 
and habits, and not that he was led to mistake your 
convenience or hobby for duty, or failed to temper the 
will by temporizing with it. The young are apt to be 

335 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

most sincere at an age when they are also most mis- 
taken, but if sincerity be kept at its deepest and best, 
error will be least harmful and easiest overcome. If 
authority supplement rather than supersede good mo- 
tives, the child will so love authority as to overcome 
your reluctance to apply it directly, and as a final 
result will choose the state and act you have pre-formed 
in its sloAvly-widening margin of freedom, and will be 
all the less liable to undue subservience to priest or 
boss, or fashion or tradition later, as obedience gives 
place to normal, manly independence. 

In these and many other ways everything in conduct 
should be mechanized as early and completely as pos- 
sible. The child's notion of what is right is what is 
habitual, and the simple, to which all else is reduced 
in thought, is identified with the familiar. It is this 
primitive stratum of habits which principally determines 
our deepest beliefs — which all must have over and above 
knowledge — to which men revert in mature years from 
youthful vagaries. If good acts are a diet and not 
a medicine, are repeated over and over again, as every 
new beat of the loom pounds in one new thread, and 
a sense of justice and right is wrought into the very 
nerve-cells and fibers; if this ground texture of the 
soul, this " memory and habit-plexus," this sphere of 
thoughts we oftenest think and acts we oftenest do, 
is early, rightly and indiscerptibly wrought, not only 
does it become a web of destiny for us, so all-determin- 
ing is it, but we have something perdurable to fall back 
on if moral shock or crisis or change or calamity shall 
have rudely broken up the whole structure of later 
associations. Not only the more we mechanize thus, 
the more force of soul is freed for higher work, but 
we are insured against emergencies in which the choice 

336 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

and deed is likely to follow the nearest motive, or that 
which acts quickest, rather than to pause and be in- 
fluenced by higher and perhaps intrinsically stronger 
motives. Reflection always brings in a new set of later- 
acquired motives and considerations, and if these are 
better than habit-mechanism, then pause is good; if not, 
he who deliberates is lost. Our purposive volitions are 
very few compared with the long series of desires, acts 
and reactions, often contradictory, many of which were 
never conscious, and many once willed but now lapsed 
to reflexes, the traces of which crowding the unknown 
margins of the soul, constitute the organ of the con- 
scious will. 

It is only so far as this primitive will is wrong by 
nature or training, that drastic reconstructions of any 
sort are needed. Only those who mistake weakness for 
innocence, or simplicity for candor, or forget that 
childish faults are no less serious because universal, 
deny the, at least, occasional depravity of all children, 
or fail to see that fear and pain are among the indis- 
pensables of education, while a parent, teacher, or even 
a God, all love, weakens and relaxes the will. Children 
do not cry for the alphabet; the multiplication table 
is more like medicine than confectionery, and it is only 
affected thoroughness that omits all that is hard. ^ ' The 
fruits of learning may be sweet, but its roots are always 
bitter," and it is this alone that makes it possible to 
strengthen the will while instructing the mind. The 
well-schooled will comes, like Herder, to scorn the luxury 
of knowing without the labor of learning. We must 
anticipate the future penalties of sloth as well as of 
badness. The will especially is a trust we are to ad- 
minister for the child, not as he may now wish, but as 
he will wish when more mature. We must now compel 

337 



/ 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATON, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

what he will later wish to compel himself to do. To 
find his habits already formed to the same law that 
his mature will and the world later enjoin, cements the 
strongest of all bonds between mentor and child. Noth- 
ing, however, must be so individual as punishment. For 
some, a threat at rare intervals is enough; while for 
others, however ominous threats may be, they become 
at once ** like scarecrows, on which the foulest birds 
soonest learn to perch." To scold well and wisely is 
an art by itself. For some children, pardon is the worst 
punishment; for others, ignoring or neglect; for others, 
isolation from friends, suspension from duties; for 
others, seclusion — which last, however, is for certain ages 
beset with extreme danger — and for still others, shame 
from being made conspicuous. Mr. Spencer's " natural 
penalties " can be applied to but few kinds of wrong, 
and those not the worst. Basedow tied boys who fell 
into temptation to a strong pillar to brace them up; 
if stupid and careless, put on a fool's cap and bells; 
if they were proud, they were suspended near the ceil- 
ing in a basket, as Aristophanes represented Socrates. 
Two boys who quarreled, were made to look into each 
other's eyes before the whole school till their angry 
expressions gave way before the general sense of the 
ridiculous. This is more ingenious than wise. The ob- 
ject of discipline is to avoid punishment, but even 
flogging should never be forbidden. It may be reserved, 
like a sword in its scabbard, but should not get so rusted 
in that it can not be drawn on occasion. The law might 
even limit the size and length of the rod, and place 
of application, as in Germany, but it should be of no less 
liberal dimensions here than there. Punishment should, 
of course, be minatory and reformatory, and not vin- 
dictive, and we should not forget that certainty is more 

338 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

effective than severity, nor that it is apt to make mo- 
tives sensuous, and delay the psychic restraint which 
should early preponderate over the physical. But will- 
culture for boys is rarely as thorough as it should be 
without more or less flogging. I would not, of course, 
urge the extremes of the past. The Spartan beating 
as a gymnastic drill to toughen, the severity which pre- 
vailed in Germany for a long time after its Thirty 
Years ^ War,^ the former fashion in so many English 
schools of walking up not infrequently to take a flog- 
ging as a plucky thing to do, and with no notion of 
disgrace attaching to it, shows at least an admirable 
strength of will. Severe constraint gives poise, inward- 
ness, self-control, inhibition, and not-willingness, if not 
willingness, while the now too common habit of coquet- 
ting for the child's favor, and tickling its ego with 
praises and prizes, and pedagogic pettifogging for its 
good-will, and sentimental fear of a judicious slap to 
rouse a spoiled child with no will to break, to make it 
keep step with the rest in conduct, instead of delaying 
a whole school-room to apply a subtle psychology of 
motives on it, is bad. This reminds one of the Jain 
who sweeps the ground before him lest he unconsciously 
tread on a worm. Possibly it may be well, as Schleier- 
macher suggests, not to repress some one nascent bad 

^ Those interested in school statistics may value the record kept by a 
Swabian schoolmaster named Haiiberle, extending over fifty-one years 
and seven months' experience as a teacher, as follows: 911,527 blows 
with a cane; 124,010 with a rod; 20,989 with a ruler; 136,715 with the 
hand; 10,295 over the mouth; 7,905 boxes on the ear; 1,115,800 snaps 
on the head; 22,763 nota benes with Bible, catechism, hymn-book, and 
grammar; 777 times boys had to kneel on peas; 613 times on triangular 
blocks of wood; 5,001 had to carry a timber mare; and, 1,701 hold the 
rod high; the last two being punishments of his own invention. Of the 
blows with the cane 800,000 were for Latin vowels, and 76,000 of those 
with the rod for Bible verses and hymns. He used a scolding vocabulary 
of over 3,000 terms, of which one- third were of his own invention. 

339 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

act in some natures, but let it and the punishment ensue 
for the sake of Dr. Spankster's tonic. Dermal pain 
is not the worst thing in the world, and by a judicious 
knowledge of how it feels at both ends of the rod, 
by flogging and being flogged, far deeper pains may 
be forefended. Insulting defiance, deliberative disobedi- 
ence, ostentatious carelessness and bravado, are diseases 
of the will, and, in very rare cases of Promethean 
obstinacy, the severe process of breaking the will is 
needful, just as in surgery it is occasionally needful to 
rebreak a limb wrongly set, or deformed, to set it over 
better. It is a cruel process, but a crampy will in 
childhood means moral traumatism of some sort in the 
adult. Few parents have the nerve to do this, or the 
insight to see just when it is needed. It is, as some one 
has said, like knocking a man down to save him from 
stepping ofl:' a precipice. Even the worst punishments 
are but very faint types of what nature has in store 
in later life for some forms of perversity of will, and 
are better than sarcasm, ridicule, or tasl^, as penalties. 
The strength of obstinacy is admirable, and every one 
ought to have his own will ; but a false direction, though 
almost always the result of faulty previous training when 
the soul was more fluid and mobile, is all the more 
fatal. While so few intelligent parents are able to re- 
frain from the self-indulgence of too much rewarding 
or giving, even though it injures the child, it is perhaps 
too much to expect the hardihood which can be justly cold 
to the caresses of a child who seeks, by displaying all 
its stock of goodness and arts of endearment, to buy 
back good-will after punishment has been deserved. If 
we wait too long, and punish in cold blood, a young child 
may hate us ; while, if we punish on the instant, and with 
passion, a little of which is always salutary, on the 

340 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

principle, ohne Affekt kein Effekt,^ an older child may- 
fail of the natural reactions of conscience, which should 
always be secured. The maxim, summum jus summa in- 
juria,^ we are often told, is peculiarly true in school, 
and so it is ; but to forego all punishment is no less in- 
justice to the average child, for it is to abandon one 
of the most effective means of will-culture. We never 
punish but a part, as it were, of the child's nature; 
he has lied, but is not therefore a liar, and we deal only 
with the specific act, and must love all the rest of him. 
And yet, after all, indiscriminate flogging is so bad, 
and the average teacher is so inadequate to that hardest 
and most tactful of all his varied duties, viz., selecting 
the right outcrop of the right fault of the right child 
at the right time and place, mood, etc., for best effect, 
that the bold statement of such principles as above is 
perhaps not entirely without practical danger, especially 
in two cases which Madame Necker and Sigismund have 
pointed out, and in several cases of which the present 
writer has notes. First, an habitually good child some- 
times has a saturnalia of defiance and disobedience; a 
series of insubordinate acts are suddenly committed 
which really mark the first sudden epochful and be- 
lated birth of the instinct of independence and self- 
regulation, on which his future manliness will depend. 
He is quite irresponsible, the acts are never repeated, and 
very lenient treatment causes him, after the conflict of tu- 
multuous feelings, has expanded his soul, to react health- 
fully into habitual docility again, if some small field 
for independent action be at once opened him. The 
other case is that of ennui, of which children suffer 
such nameless qualms. When I should open half a 

1 Without passion, no effect. 

2 The rigor of the law may be the greatest wrong. 

341 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

dozen books, start for a walk, and then turn back, wan- 
der about in mind or body, seeking but not finding 
content in anything, a child in my mood will wish for 
a toy, an amusement, food, a rare indulgence, only to 
neglect or even reject it petulantly when granted. 
These flitting "will-spectres " are physical, are a mild 
form of the many fatal dangers of fatigue ; and punish- 
ment is the worst of treatment. Rest or diversion is 
the only cure, and the teacher's mind must be fruitful 
of purposes to that end. Perhaps a third case for pal- 
liative treatment is, those lies which attend the first 
sense of badness. The desire to conceal it occasionally 
accompanies the nascent effort to reform and make the 
lie true. These cases are probably rare, while the temp- 
tation to lie is far greater for one who does ill than 
for one who does well, for fear is the chief motive, and 
a successful lie which concealed would weaken the de- 
sire to cure a fault. 

We have thus far spoken of obedience, and come now 
to the later necessity of self-guidance, which, if obedi- 
ence has wrought its perfect work, will be natural and 
inevitable. It is very hard to combine reason and 
coercion, yet it is needful that children think them- 
selves free long before we cease to determine them. As 
we slowly cease to prescribe and begin to inspire, a very 
few well-chosen mottoes, proverbs, maxims, should be 
taught very simply, so that they will sink deep. Educa- 
tion has been defined as working against the chance influ- 
ences of life, and it is certain that without some precepts 
and rules the will will not exert itself. If reasons are 
given, and energy is much absorbed in understanding, the 
child will assent but will not do. If the mind is not 
strong, many wide ideas are very dangerous. Strong 
wills are not fond of arguments, and if a young person 

342 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

falls to talking or thinking beyond his experience, sub- 
jective or objective, both conduct and thought are soon 
confused by chaotic and incongruous opinions and be- 
liefs; and false expectations, which are the very se- 
ducers of the will, arise. There can be little will- 
training by words, and the understanding can not realize 
the ideals of the will. All great things are dangerous, 
as Plato said, and the truth itself is not only false but 
actually immoral to unexpanded minds. Will-culture 
is intensive, not extensive, and the writer knows a case 
in which even a vacation ramble with a moralizing 
rabulist has undermined the work of years. Our pre- 
cepts must be made very familiar, copiously illustrated, 
well wrought together by habit and attentive thought, 
and above all clear cut, that the pain of violating them 
may be sharp and poignant. Vague and too general 
precepts beyond the horizon of the child's real experi- 
ence do not haunt him if they are outraged. Now the 
child must obey these, and will, if he has learned to 
obey well the command of others. 

One of the best sureties that he will do so is muscle- 
culture, for if the latter are weaker than the nerves 
and brain, the gap between knowing and doing appears 
and the will stagnates. Gutsmuths, the father of gym- 
nastics in Germany before Jahn, used to warn men not 
to fancy that the few tiny muscles that moved the pen 
or tongue had power to elevate men. They might titil- 
late the soul with words and ideas; but rigorous, sym- 
metrical muscle-culture alone, he and his Turner 
societies believed, could regenerate the Fatherland, for 
it was one thing to paint the conflict of life, and quite 
another to bear arms in it. They said, " The weaker 
the body the more it commands; the stronger it is the 
more it obeys.'' 

23 343 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

In this way we shall have a strong, well-knit soul- 
texture, made up of volitions and ideas like warp and 
woof. Mind and will will be so compactly organized 
that all their forces can be brought to a single point. 
Each concept or purpose will call up those related to 
it, and once strongly set toward its object, the soul will 
find itself borne along by unexpected forces. This 
power of totalizing, rather than any transcendent re- 
lation of elements, constitutes at least the practical unity 
of the soul, and this unimpeded association of its 
elements is true or inner freedom of will. Nothing is 
wanting or lost when the powers of the soul are 
mobilized for a great task, and its substance is im- 
pervious to passion. With this organization, men of 
really little power accomplish wonders. Without it 
great minds are confused and lost. They have only 
velleity or caprice. The will makes a series of vigor- 
ous, perhaps almost convulsive, but short, inconsistent 
efforts. As Jean Paul says, there is sulphur, charcoal, 
and saltpetre in the soul, but powder is not made, for 
they never find each other. To understand this will- 
plexus is preeminent among the new demands now laid 
on educators. 

But, although this focalizing power of acting with 
the whole rather than with a part of the soul, gives 
independence of many external, conventional, proximate 
standards of conduct, deepening our interests in life, 
and securing us against disappointment by defining our 
expectations, while such a sound and simple will- 
philosophy is proof against considerable shock and has 
firmness of texture enough to bear much responsibility, 
there is, of course, something deeper, without which all 
our good conduct is more or less hollow. This is 
that better purity established by mothers in the 

344 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

plastic heart, before the superfoetation of precept is 
possible, or even before the ** soul takes flight in lan- 
guage "; it is perhaps pre-natal or hereditary. Much 
every way depends on how aboriginal our goodness is, 
whether the will acts with effort, as we solve an in- 
tricate problem, in solitude, or as we say the multiplica- 
tion table, which only much distraction can confuse, 
or as we repeat the alphabet, which the din of battle 
could not hinder. Later and earlier training should har- 
monize with each other and with nature. Thrice happy 
he who is so wisely trained that he comes to believe he 
believes what his soul deeply does believe, to say what 
he feels and feel what he really does feel, and chiefly 
whose express volitions square with the profounder drift 
of his will as the resultant of all he has desired or wished, 
expected, attended to, or striven for. When such an 
one comes to his moral majority by standing for the 
first time upon his own careful conviction, against the 
popular cry, or against his own material interests or 
predaceous passions, and feels the constraint and joy of 
pure obligation which comes up from this deep source, 
a new, original force is brought into the world of wills. 
Call it inspiration, or Kant's transcendental impulse 
above and outside of experience, or Spencer's deep re- 
verberations from a vast and mysterious past of com- 
pacted ancestral experiences, the most concentrated, dis- 
tilled and instinctive of all psychic products, and as old 
as Mr. Tyndall's " fiery cloud " — the name or even 
source is little. We would call it the purest, freest, 
most prevailing, because most inward, will or conscience. 
This free, habitual guidance by the highest and best, 
by conviction with no sense of compulsion or obligation, 
is an impractical if not dangerous ideal, for it can be 
actually realized only by the rarest moral genius. For 

345 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

most of us, the best education is that which makes us 
the best and most obedient servants. This is the way 
of peace and the way of nature, for even if we seri- 
ously try to keep up a private conscience at all, apart 
from feeling, faction, party or class spirit, or even 
habit, which are our habitual guides, the difficulties are 
so great that most hasten, more or less consciously and 
voluntarily, to put themselves under authority again, 
reserving only the smallest margin of independence in 
material interests, choice of masters, etc., and yielding 
to the pleasing and easy illusion that inflates the mini- 
mum to seem the maximum of freedom, and uses the 
noblest ideal of history, viz., that of pure autonomous 
oughtness, as a pedestal for idols of selfislmess, caprice 
and conceit. The trouble is in interpreting these moral 
instincts, for even the authorities lack the requisite self- 
knowledge in which all wisdom culminates. The moral 
interregnum which the AiifklcWiing ^ has brought will 
not end till these instincts are rightly interpreted by in- 
telligence. The richest streams of thought must flow 
about them, the best methods must peep and pry till 
their secrets are found and put into the idea-pictures 
in which most men think. 

This brings us, finally, to the highest and also im- 
mediately practical method of moral education, viz., 
training the will by and for intellectual work. Y^outh 
and childhood must not be subordinated as means to 
maturity. Learning is more useful than knowing. It 
is the way and not the goal, the work and not the prod- 
uct, the acquiring and not the acquisition, that educates 
will and character. To teach only results, which are so 
simple, without methods by which they were obtained, 

1 Enlightenment. 

346 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

which are so complex and hard, to develop the sense of 
possession without the strain of activity, to teach great 
matters too easily or even as play, always to wind along 
the lines of least resistance into the child's mind, is 
simply to add another and most enervating luxury to 
child-life. Only the sense and power of effort, which 
made Lessing prefer the search to the possession of 
truth, v/hich trains the will in the intellectual field, 
which is becoming more and more the field of its ac- 
tivity, counts for character and makes instruction really 
educating. This makes mental work a series of acts, or 
living thoughts, and not merely words. Real education, 
that we can really teach, and that which is really most 
examinable, is what w^e do, while those who acquire 
without effort may be extremely instructed without being 
truly educated. 

It is those who have been trained to put forth mental 
power that come to the front later, while it is only those 
whose acquisitions are not transpeciated into power who 
are in danger of early collapse. 

It is because of this imperfect appropriation through 
lack of volitional reaction that mental training is so 
often dangerous, especially in its higher grades. Espe- 
cially wherever good precepts are allowed to rest peace- 
fully beside undiscarded bad habits, moral weakness is 
directly cultivated. Volitional recollection, or forcing 
the mind to reproduce a train of impressions, strength- 
ens what we may call the mental will ; while if multifa- 
rious impressions which excite at the time are left to take 
their chances, at best, fragmentary reproduction, incipi- 
ent amnesia, the prelude of mental decay, may be soon 
detected. Few can endure the long working over of 
ideas, especially if at all fundamental, which is needful 
to full maturity of mind, without grave moral danger. 

347 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

New standpoints and ideas require new combinations of 
the mental elements, with constant risk that during the 
process, what was already secured will fall back into 
its lower components. Even our immigrants suffer mor- 
ally from the change of manners and customs and ideas, 
and yet education means change ; the more training the 
more change, as a rule, and the more danger during the 
critical transition period while we oscillate between con- 
trol by old habits, or association within the old circle of 
thought, and by the new insights, as a medical student 
often suffers from trying to bring the regulation of his 
physical functions under new and imperfect hygienic 
insights. Thus most especially if old questions, concern- 
ing which we have long since ceased to trust ourselves 
to give reasons, need to be reopened, there is especial 
danger that the new equilibrium about which the dynamic 
is to be re-resolved into static power will be established, 
if at all, with loss instead of with gain. Indeed, it is a 
question not of schools but of civilization, whether mental 
training, from the three R's to science and philosophy, 
shall really make men better, as the theory of popular 
education assumes, and whether the genius and talent of 
the few who can receive and bear it can be brought to the 
full maturity of a knowledge fully f acultized — a question 
paramount, even in a republic, to the general education 
of the many. 

The illusion is that beginnings are hard. They are 
easy. Almost any mind can advance a little way into 
almost any subject. The feeblest youth can push on 
briskly in the beginning of a new subject, but he forgets, 
and so does the examiner who marks him, that difficul- 
ties increase not in arithmetical but in almost geometrical 
ratio as he advances. The fact, too, that all topics are 
taught by all teachers and that we have no specialized 

348 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

teaching in elementary branches, and that examina- 
tions are placed in the most debilitating part of our 
peculiarly debilitating spring, these help us to solve the 
problem which China has solved so well, viz., how to in- 
struct and not to educate. A pass mark, say of fifty, 
should be given not for mastery of the first half of the 
book, or for knowledge of half the matter in it, but for 
that of three-fourths or more. Suppose one choose the 
easier method of tattooing his mind by attaining the easy 
early stages of proficiency in many subjects, as is possible 
and even encouraged in too many of our school and col- 
lege curricula, he weakens the will-quality of his mind. 
Smattering is dissipation of energy. Only great, con- 
centrated and prolonged efforts in one direction really 
train the mind, because only they train the will beneath 
it. Many little, heterogeneous efforts of different sorts 
leave the mind in a muddle of heterogeneous impressions, 
and the will like a rubber band is stretched to flaccidity 
around one after another bundle of objects too large for 
it to clasp into unity. Here again, in der Beschrdnkung 
zeigt sich der Meister ^ ; all-sidedness through one-sided- 
ness ; by stalking the horse or cow out in the spring time, 
till he gnaws his small allotted circle of grass to the 
ground, and not by roving and cropping at will, can he 
be taught that the sweetest joint is nearest the root, are 
convenient symbols of will-culture in the intellectual field. 
Even a long cram, if only on one subject, which brings 
out the relations of the parts, or a " one-study college," 
as is already devised in the West, or the combination of 
several subjects even in primary school grades into a 
" concentration series," as devised by Ziller and Rein, 
the university purpose as defined by Ziller of so combin- 

1 The master shows himself in self-hm^itation. 

349 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

ing studies that each shall stand in the course next to 
that with which it is inherently closest connected by 
matter and method, or the requirements of one central 
and two collateral branches for the doctorate examina- 
tion — all these devices no doubt tend to give a sense of 
efficiency, which is one of the deepest and proudest joys 
of life, in the place of a sense of possession so often 
attended by the exquisite misery of conscious weakness. 
The unity of almost any even ideal purpose is better 
than none, if it tend to check the superficial one of learn- 
ing to repeat again or of boxing the whole compass of 
sciences and liberal arts, as so many of our high schools 
or colleges attempt. 

Finally, in the sphere of mental productivity and 
originality, a just preponderance of the will-element 
makes men distrust new insights, quick methods, and 
short cuts, and trust chiefly to the genius of honest and 
sustained work, in power of which perhaps lies the great- 
est intellectual difference between men. When ideas are 
ripe for promulgation they have been condensed and 
concentrated, thought traverses them quickly and easily 
— in a word, they have become practical, and the will that 
waits over a new idea patiently and silently, without 
anxiety, even though with a deepening sense of respon- 
sibility, till all sides have been seen, all authorities con- 
sulted, all its latent mental reserves heard from, is 
the man who '' talks with the rifle and not with the 
water-hose," or, in a rough farmer's phrase, " boils his 
words till he can give his hearers sugar and not sap.'^ 
Several of the more important discoveries of the present 
generation, which cost many weary months of toil, have 
been enumerated in a score or two of lines, so that every 
experimenter could set up his apparatus and get the 
results in a few minutes. Let us not forget that, in most 

350 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

departments of mental work, the more we revise and re- 
construct our thought, the longer we inhibit its final ex- 
pression, while the oftener we return to it refreshed from 
other interests, the clearer and more permeable for other 
minds it becomes, because the more it tends to express it- 
self in terms of willed action, which is ' ' the language of 
complete men. ' ' 

So closely bound together are moral and religious 
training that a discussion of one without the other would 
be incomplete. In a word, religion is the most generic 
kind of culture as opposed to all systems or departments 
which are one-sided. All education culminates in it be- 
cause it is chief among human interests, and because it 
gives inner unity to the mind, heart, and will. How now 
should this common element of union be taught ? 

To be really effective and lasting, moral and re^ 
ligious training must begin in the cradle. It was a 
profound remark of Froebel that the unconscious7iess of 
a child is rest in God. This need not be understood in 
any pantheistic sense. From this rest in God the child- 
ish soul should not be abruptly or prematurely aroused. 
Even the primeval stages of psychic growth are rarely 
so all-sided, so purely unsolicited, spontaneous, and un- 
precocious, as not to be in a sense a fall from Froebel's 
unconsciousness or rest in God. The sense of touch, the 
mother of all the other senses, is the only one which the 
child brings into the world already experienced ; but by 
the pats, caresses, hugs, etc., so instinctive with young 
mothers, varied feelings and sentiments are communi- 
cated to the child long before it recognizes its own body 
as distinct from things about it. The mother's face and 
voice are the first conscious objects as the infant soul 
unfolds, and she soon comes to stand in the very place 
of God to her child. All the religion of which the child 

351 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

is capable during this by no means brief stage of its 
development consists of those sentiments — gratitude, 
trust, dependence, love, etc., now felt only for her — 
which are later directed toward God. The less these 
are now cultivated toward the mother, who is now their 
only fitting if not their only possible object, the more 
feebly they will later be felt toward God. This, too, 
adds greatly to the sacredness and the responsibilities 
of motherhood. Froebel perhaps is right that thus 
fundamental religious sentiments can be cultivated in 
the earliest months of infancy. It is of course impossi- 
ble not to seem, perhaps even not to be, sentimental upon 
this theme, for the infant soul has no other content than 
sentiments, and because upon these rests the whole 
superstructure of religion in child or adult. The moth- 
er's emotions, and physical and mental states, indeed, 
are imparted and reproduced in the infant so immedi- 
ately, unconsciously, and through so many avenues, 
that it is no wonder that these relations seem mystic. 
Whether the mother is habitually under the influence 
of calm and tranquil emotions, or her temper is fluc- 
tuating or violent, or her movements are habitually 
energetic or soft and caressing, or she be regular or 
irregular in her ministrations to the infant in her arms, 
all these characteristics and habits are registered in the 
primeval language of touch upon the nervous system of 
the child. From this point of view, poise and calmness, 
the absence of all intense stimuli and of sensations or 
transitions which are abrupt or sudden, and an atmos- 
phere of quieting influences, like everything which re- 
tards by broadening, is in the general line of religious 
culture. The soul of an infant is well compared to a 
seed planted in a garden. It is not pressed or moved 
by the breezes which rustle the leaves overhead. The 

352 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

sunlight does not fall upon it, and even dew and even- 
ing coolness scarcely reach it; but yet there is not a 
breath of air, nor a ray of sunshine, nor a drop of 
moisture to which it is unresponsive, and which does 
not stir all its germinant forces. The child is a plant, 
must live out of doors in proper season, and there must 
be no forcing. Religion, then, at this important stage, 
at least, is naturalism pure and simple, and religious 
training is the supreme art of standing out of nature's 
way. So implicit is the unity of soul and body at this 
formative age that care of the body is the most effective 
ethico-religious culture. 

Next to be considered are the sentiments which un- 
fold under the influence of that fresh and naive curiosity 
which attends the first impressions of natural objects 
from which both religion and science spring as from 
one common root. The awe and sublimity of a thunder- 
storm, the sights and sounds of a spring morning, objects 
which lead the child's thoughts to what is remote in time 
and space, old trees, ruins, the rocks, and, above all, the 
heavenly bodies — the utilization of these lessons is the 
most important task of the religious teacher during 
the kindergarten stage of childhood. Still more than 
the undevout astronomer, the undevout child under such 
influences is abnormal. In these directions the mind of 
the child is as open and plastic as that of the ancient 
prophet to the promptings of the inspiring Spirit. The 
child can recognize no essential difference between nature 
and the supernatural, and the products of mythopoeic 
fancy which have been spun about natural objects, and 
which have lain so long and so warm about the hearts of 
generations and races of men, are now the best of all 
nutriments for the soul. To teach scientific rudiments 
only about nature, on the shallow principle that nothing 

353 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

should be taught which must be unlearned, or to en- 
courage the child to assume the critical attitude of mind, 
is dwarfing the heart and prematurely forcing the head. 
It has been said that country life is religion for chil- 
dren at this stage. However this may be, it is clear thfft 
natural religion is rooted in such experiences, and pre- 
cedes revealed religion in the order of growth and educa- 
tion, whatever its logical order in systems of thought 
may be. A little later, habits of truthfulness ^ are best 
cultivated by the use of the senses in exact observation. 
To see a simple phenomenon in nature and report it fully 
and correctly is no easy matter, but the habit of trying 
to do so teaches what truthfulness is, and leaves the 
impress of truth upon the whole life and character. 
I do not hesitate to say, therefore, that elements of 
science should be taught to children for the moral effects 
of its influences. At the same time all truth is not 
sensuous, and this training alone at this age tends to 
make the mind pragmatic, dry, and insensitive or un- 
responsive to that other kind of truth the value of which 
is not measured by its certainty so much as by its 
effect upon us. We must learn to interpret the heart 
and our native instincts as truthfully as we do external 
nature, for our happiness in life depends quite as largely 
upon bringing our beliefs into harmony with the deeper 
feelings of our nature as it does upon the ability to 
adapt ourselves to our physical environment. Thus not 
only all religious beliefs and moral acts will strengthen 
if they truly express the character instead of cultivat- 
ing affectation and insincerity in opinion, word, and 
deed, as with mistaken pedagogic methods they may 

* For most recent and elaborate study of children's lies see Zeitschrif t 
fiir padagogische Psychologie, Pathologie und Hygiene, Juli, 1905. Jahr- 
gang 7, Heft 3, pp. 177-205. 

354 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

do. This latter can be avoided only by leaving all to 
naturalism and spontaneity at first, and feeding the soul 
only according to its appetites and stage of growth. 
No religious truth must be taught as fundamental — 
especially as fundamental to morality — which can be 
seriously doubted or even misunderstood. Yet it must 
be expected that convictions will be transformed and 
worked over and over again, and only late, if at all, will 
an equilibrium between the heart and the truth it clings 
to as finally satisfying be attained. Hence most positive 
religious instruction, or public piety, if taught at all, 
•should be taught briefly as most serious but too high for 
the child yet, or as rewards to stimulate curiosity for them 
later, but sacred things should not become too familiar or 
be conventionalized before they can be felt or understood. 

The child's conception of God should not be personal 
or too familiar at first, but He should appear distant and 
vague, inspiring awe and reverence far more than love; 
in a word, as the God of nature rather than as devoted to 
serviceable ministrations to the child's individual wants. 
The latter should be taught to be a faithful servant 
rather than a favorite of God. The inestimable peda- 
gogic value of the God-idea consists in that it widens the 
child's glimpse of the whole, and gives the first present- 
iment of the universality of laws, such as are observed 
in its experiences and that of others, so that all things 
seem comprehended under one stable system or gov- 
ernment. The slow realization that God's laws are not 
like those of parents and teachers, evadible, suspensible, 
but changeless, and their penalties sure as the laws of 
nature, is a most important factor of moral training. 
First the law, the schoolmaster, then the Gospel; first 
nature, then grace, is the order of growth. 

The pains or pleasures which follow many acts are 
355 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

immediate, while the results that follow others are so 
remote or so serious that the child must utilize the ex- 
perience of others. Artificial rewards and punishments 
must be cunningly devised so as to simulate and typify- 
as closely as possible the real natural penalty, and they 
must be administered uniformly and impartially like 
laws of nature. As commands are just, and as they are 
gradually perceived to spring from superior wisdom, 
respect arises, which Kant called the bottom motive of 
duty, and defined as the immediate determination of the 
will by law, thwarting self-love. Here the child rev- 
erences what is not understood as authority, and to the 
childish " Why? " which always implies imperfect re- 
spect for the authority, however displeasing its behest, 
the teacher or parent should always reply, ' ' You cannot 
understand why yet, ' ' unless quite sure that a convincing 
and controlling insight can be given, such as shall make 
all future exercise of outward authority in this particu- 
lar unnecessary. From this standpoint the great im- 
portance of the character and native dignity of the 
teacher is best seen. Daily contact with some teachers is 
itself all-sided ethical education for the child without a 
spoken precept. Here, too, the real advantage of male 
over female teachers, especially for boys, is seen in their 
superior physical strength, which often, if highly esti- 
mated, gives real dignity and commands real respect, 
and especially in the unquestionably greater uniformity 
of their moods and their discipline. 

During the first years of school life, a point of prime 
importance in ethico-religious training is the education 
of conscience. This latter is the most complex and per- 
haps the most educable of all our so-called " faculties.'* 
A system of carefully arranged talks, with copious illus- 
trations from history and literature, about such topics as 

356 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

fair play, slang, cronies, dress, teasing, getting mad, 
prompting in class, white lies, affectation, cleanliness, 
order, honor, taste, self-respect, treatment of animals, 
reading, vacation pursuits, etc., can be brought quite 
within the range of boy-and-girl interests by a sym- 
pathetic and tactful teacher, and be made immediately 
and obviously practical. All this is nothing more or less 
than conscience-building. The old superstition that 
children have innate faculties of such a finished sort that 
they flash up and grasp the principle of things by a 
rapid sort of first '' intellection," an error that made 
all departments of education so trivial, assumptive and 
dogmatic for centuries before Comenius, Basedow and 
Pestalozzi, has been banished everywhere save from 
moral and religious training, where it still persists in 
full force. The senses develop first, and all the higher 
intuitions called by the collective name of conscience 
gradually and later in life. They first take the form of 
sentiments without much insight, and are hence liable 
to be unconscious affectation, and are caught insensibly 
from the environment with the aid of inherited pre- 
disposition, and only made more definite by such talks 
as the above. But parents are prone to forget that 
healthful and correct sentiments concerning matters of 
conduct are, at first, very feeble, and that the sense 
of obligation needs the long and careful guardianship 
of external authority. Just as a young medical student 
with a rudimentary notion of physiology and hygiene 
is sometimes disposed to undertake a more or less com- 
plete reform of his diet, regimen, etc., to make it 
'' scientific " in a way that an older and a more learned 
physician would shrink from, so the half-insights of 
boys into matters of moral regimen are far too apt, in 
the American temperament, to expend, in precocious 

357 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

emancipation and crude attempts at practical realization, 
the force which is needed to bring their insights to 
maturity. Authority should be relaxed gradually, ex- 
plicitly, and provisionally over one definite department 
of conduct at a time. To distinguish right and wrong 
in their own nature is the highest and most complex of 
intellectual processes. Most men and all children are 
guided only by associations of greater or less subtlety. 
Perhaps the whole round of human duties might be best 
taught by gathering illustrations of selfishness and trac- 
ing it in its countless disguises and ramifications through 
every stage of life. Selfishness is opposed to a sense of 
the infinite and is inversely as real religion, and the 
study of it is not, like systematic ethics, apt to be con- 
fused and made unpractical by conflicting theories. 

The Bible, the great instrument in the education of 
conscience, is far less juvenile than it is now the fashion 
to suppose. At the very least, it expresses the result of 
the ripest human experience, the noblest traditions of 
humanity. Old Testament history, even more than most 
very ancient history, is distilled to an almost purely 
ethical content. For centuries Scripture was withheld 
from the masses for the same reason that Plato refused 
at first to put his thoughts into writing, because it 
would be sure to be misunderstood by very many and 
lead to that worst of errors and fanaticism caused by 
half-truths. Children should not approach it too lightly. 

The Old Testament, perhaps before or more than the 
New, is the Bible for childhood. A good, protracted 
course of the law pedagogically prepares the way for the 
apprehension of the Gospel. Then the study of the Old 
Testament should begin with selected tales, told, as in 
the German schools, impressively, in the teacher's lan- 
guage, but objectively, and without exegetical or horta- 

358 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

tory comment. The appeal is directly to the under- 
standing only at first, but the moral lesson is brought 
clearly and surely Avithin the child's reach, but not 
personally applied after the manner common with us. 

Probably the most important changes for the educator 
to study are those which begin between the ages of 
twelve and sixteen and are completed only some years 
later, when the young adolescent receives from nature a 
new capital of energy and altruistic feeling. It is a 
physiological second birth, and success in life depends 
upon the care and wisdom with which this new and 
final invoice of energy is husbanded. These changes 
constitute a natural predisposition to a change of heart, 
and may perhaps be called, in Kantian phrase, its schema. 
Even from the psychophj^sic standpoint it is a correct 
.instinct which has slowly led churches to center so much 
of their cultus upon regeneration. In this I, of course, 
only assert here the neurophysical side, which is every- 
where present, even if everywhere subordinate to the 
spiritual side. As everywhere, so here, too, the phj^sical 
may be called in a sense regulative rather than con- 
stitutive. It is therefore not surprising that statistics 
show that far more conversions, proportionately, take 
place during the adolescent period, which does not nor- 
mally end before the age of twenty-four or five, than dur- 
ing any other period of equal length. At this age most 
churches confirm. 

Before this age the child lives in the present, is nor- 
mally selfish, deficient in sympathy, but frank and con- 
fidential, obedient to authority, and without affecta- 
tion save the supreme affectation of childhood, viz., 
assuming the words, manners, habits, etc., of those older 
than itself. But now stature suddenly increases, and the 
power of physical and mental endurance and effort 
24 359 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN. AND HYGIENE 

diminishes for a time; larynx, nose, chin change, and 
normal and morbid ancestral traits and features appear. 
Far greater and more protracted, though unseen, are the 
changes which take place in the nervous system, both in 
the development of the cortex and expansion of the 
convolutions and the growth of association-fibers by 
which the elements shoot together and relation of things 
are seen, which hitherto seemed independent, to which it 
seems as if for a few years the energies of growth were 
chiefly directed. Hence this period is so critical and 
changes in character are so rapid. No matter hoAV confi- 
dential the relations with the parent may have been, an 
important domain of the soul now declares its independ- 
ence. Confidences are shared with those of equal age and 
withheld from parents, especially by boys, to an extent 
probably little suspected by most parents. Education 
must be addressed to freedom, which recognizes only self- 
made law, and spontaneity of opinion and conduct is 
manifested, often in extravagant and grotesque forms. 
There is now a longing for that kind of close sympathy 
and friendship which makes cronies and intimates ; there 
is a craving for strong emotions which gives pleasure in 
exaggerations ; and there are nameless longings for what 
is far, remote, strange, which emphasizes the self-es- 
trangement which Hegel so well describes, and which 
marks the normal rise of the presentiment of something 
higher than self. Instincts of rivalry and competition 
now grow strong in boys, and girls grow more conscien- 
tious and inward, and begin to feel their music, reading, 
religion, painting, etc., and to realize the bearing of 
these upon their future adult life. There is often a 
strong instinct of devotion and self-sacrifice toward some, 
perhaps almost any, object, or in almost any cause which 
circumstances may present. Moodiness and perhaps a 

360 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

love of solitude are developed. " Growing fits " make 
hard and severe labor of body and mind impossible with- 
out dwarfing or arresting the development, by robbing 
of its nutrition some part of the organism — stomach, 
lungs, chest, heart, back, brain, etc. — which is peculiarly 
liable to disease later. It is never so hard to tell the 
truth plainly and objectively and without any subjective 
twist. The life of the mere individual ceases and that 
of person, or better, of the race, begins. It is a period of 
realization, and hence often of introspection. In healthy 
natures it is the golden age of life, in which enthusiasm, 
sympathy, generosity, and curiosity are at their strongest 
and best, and when growth is so rapid that, e. g., each 
college class is conscious of a vast interval of development 
which separates it from the class below; but it is also a 
period subject to Wertherian crises, such as Hume, 
Richter, J. S. Mill, and others passed through, and all 
depends on the direction given to these new forces. 

The dangers of this period are great and manifest. 
The chief of these, far greater even than the dangers of 
intemperance, is that the sexual elements of soul and 
body will be developed prematurely and disproportion- 
ately. Indeed, early maturity in this respect is itself bad. 
If it occurs before other compensating and controlling 
powers are unfolded, this element is hypertrophied and 
absorbs and dwarfs their energy and it is then more 
likely to be uninstructed and to suck up all that is vile 
in the environment. Far more than we realize, the 
thoughts and feelings of youth center about this factor 
of his nature. Quite apart, therefore, from its intrinsic 
value, education should serve the purpose of preoccupa- 
tion, and should divert attention from an element of our 
nature the premature or excessive development of which 
dwarfs every part of soul and body. Intellectual in- 

361 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

terests, athleticism, social and esthetic tastes, should be 
cultivated. There should be some change in external 
life. Previous routine and drill-work must be broken 
through and new occupations resorted to, that the mind 
may not be left idle while the hands are mechanically 
employed. Attractive home-life, friendships well chosen 
and on a high plane, and regular habits, should of course 
be cultivated. Now, too, though the intellect is not 
frequently judged insane, so that pubescent insanity is 
comparatively rare, the feelings, which are yet more 
fundamental to mental sanity, are most often perverted, 
and lack of emotional steadiness, violent and dangerous 
impulses, unreasonable conduct, lack of enthusiasm and 
sympathy, are very commonly caused by abnormalities 
here. Neurotic disturbances, such as hysteria, chorea, 
and, in the opinion of some physicians, sick-headache and 
early dementia are peculiarly liable to appear and be- 
come seated during this period. In short, the previous 
selfhood is broken up like the regulation copy hand- 
writing of early school years, and a new individual is in 
process of crystallization. All is solvent, plastic, pe- 
culiarly susceptible to external influences. 

Between love and religion, God and nature have 
wrought a strong and indissoluble bond. Flagellations, 
fasts, exposure, excessive penances of many kinds, the 
Hindoo cultus of quietude, and mental absorption in 
vacuity and even one pedagogic motive of a cultus of the 
spiritual and supernatural, e. g. in the symposium of 
Plato, are all designed as palliatives and alteratives of 
degraded love. Change of heart before pubescent years, 
there are several scientific reasons for thinking, means 
precocity and forcing. The age signalized by the ancient 
Greeks as that at which the study of what was com- 
prehensively called music should begin, the age at which 

362 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

Roman guardianship ended, as explained by Sir Henry- 
Maine, at which boys are confirmed in the modern Greek, 
Catholic, Lutheran and Episcopal churches, and at which 
the child Jesus entered the temple, is as early as any 
child ought consciously to go about his heavenly Father 's 
business. If children are instructed in the language 
of these sentiments too early, the all-sided deepening and 
broadening of soul and of conscience which should come 
with adolescent years will be incomplete. Revival ser- 
mons which the writer has heard preached to very young 
children are analogous to exhorting them to imagine 
themselves married people and inculcating the duties of 
that relation. It is because this precept is violated in the 
intemperate haste for immediate results that we may so 
often hear childish sentiments and puerile expressions so 
strangely mingled in the religious experience of otherwise 
apparently mature adults, which remind one of a male 
voice constantly modulating from manly tones into boyish 
falsetto. Some one has said of very early risers that 
they were apt to be conceited all the forenoon, and stupid 
and uninteresting all the afternoon and evening. So, 
too, precocious infant Christians are apt to be conceited 
and full of pious affectations all the forenoon of life, and 
thereafter commonplace enough in their religious life. 
One is reminded of Aristotle's theory of Catharsis, ac- 
cording to which the soul was purged of strong or bad 
passions by listening to vivid representations of them on 
the stage. So, by the forcing method we deprecate, the 
soul is given just enough religious stimulus to act as an 
inoculation against deeper and more serious interest 
later. At this age the prescription of a series of strong 
feelings is very apt to cause attention to concentrate on 
physical states in a way which may culminate in the in- 
creased activity of the passional nature, or may induce 

363 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

that sort of self-flirtation which is expressed in morbid 
love of autobiographic confessional outpourings, or may 
issue in the supreme selfishness of incipient and often 
unsuspected hysteria. Those who are led to Christ nor- 
mally by obeying conscience are not apt to endanger the 
foundation of their moral character if they should later 
chance to doubt the doctrine of verbal inspiration or 
some of the miracles, or even get confused about the 
Trinity, because their religious nature is not built on the 
sand. The art of leading young men through college 
without ennobling or enlarging any of the religious 
notions of childhood is anti-pedagogic and unworthy 
philosophy, and is to leave men puerile in the highest de- 
partment of their nature. 

At the age we have indicated, when the young man 
instinctively takes the control of himself into his own 
hands, previous ethico-religious training should be 
brought to a focus and given a personal application, 
which, to be most effective, should probably, in most 
cases, be according to the creed of the parent. It is a 
serious and solemn epoch, and ought to be fittingly sig- 
nalized. Morality now needs religion, which cannot have 
affected life much before. Now duties should be recog- 
nized as divine commands, for the strongest motives, 
natural and supernatural, are needed for the regulation 
of the new impulses, passions, desires, half-insights, am- 
bitions, etc., which come to the American temperament 
so suddenly before the methods of self-regulation can 
become established and operative. Now a deep personal 
sense of purity and impurity are first possible, and indeed 
inevitable, and this natural moral tension is a great op- 
portunity to the religious teacher. A serious sense of 
God within, and of responsibilities which transcend this 
life as they do the adolescent's power of comprehension; 

364 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING 

a feeling for duties deepened by a realization and ex- 
perience of tlieir conflict such as some have thought to be 
the origin of religion itself in the soul — these, too, are 
elements of the ' ' theology of the heart ' ' revealed at this 
age to every serious youth, but to the judicious em- 
phasis and utilization of which, the teacher should lend 
his consummate skill. While special lines of interest 
leading to a career must be now well grounded, there 
must also be a culture of the ideal and an absorption in 
general views and remote and universal ends. If all that 
is pure and disciplining in what is transcendent, whether 
to the Christian believers, the poet or the philosopher, 
had even been devised only for the better regulation of 
human energies set free at this age, but not yet fully 
defined or realized, they would still have a most potent 
justification on this ground alone. At any rate, what is 
often wasted in excess here, if husbanded, ripens into 
philosophy, the larger love to the world, the true and 
the good, in a sense not unlike that in the symposium of 
Plato. 

Finally, there is danger lest this change, as prescribed 
and formulated by the church, be too sudden and violent, 
and the capital of moral force which should last a life- 
time be consumed in a brief, convulsive effort, like the 
sudden running down of a watch if its spring be broken. 
Piety is naturally the slowest because the most compre- 
hensive kind of growth. Quetelet says that the meas- 
ure of the state of civilization in a nation is the way in 
which it achieves its revolutions. As it becomes truly 
civilized, revolutions cease to be sudden and violent, and 
become gradually transitory and without abrupt change. 
The same is true of that individual crisis which psycho- 
physiology describes as adolescence, and of which theolo- 
gy formulates a higher spiritual potency as conversion. 

365 



YOUTH : ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 

The adolescent period lasts ten years or more, during all 
of which development of every sort is very rapid and 
constant, and it is, as already remarked, intemperate 
haste for immediate results, of reaping without sowing, 
which has made so many regard change of heart as an 
instantaneous conquest rather than as a growth, and 
persistently to forget that there is something of impor- 
tance before and after it in healthful religious experience. 



366 



GLOSSARY 



Agamic. Unmarried; unmarriageable; sometimes non-sexed. 

Agenic. Lacking in reproductive power; sterile. 

Amphimixis. That form of reproduction which involves the 
mingling of substance from two individuals so as to effect 
a mixture of hereditary characteristics. It includes the 
phenomena of conjugation and fertilization among both 
unicellular and multicellular organisms. 

Anabolism. See Metabolism. 

Anamnesic. Pertaining to or aiding recollection. 

Anemic. Deficient in blood; bloodless. 

Anthropomorphism. The attributing of human characteristics 
to natural, supernatural, or divine beings. 

Anthropometry. Science of measurement of the human body. 

Artifact. Any artificial product. 

Aphasia. Impairment or loss of the ability to understand or 
use speech. 

Associationism. The psychological theory which regards the 
laws of association as the fundamental laws of mental action 
and development. 

Atavistic. Pertaining to reversion through the influence of 
heredity to remote ancestral characteristics. 

Ataxic. Pertaining to inability to coordinate voluntary move- 
ments; irregular. 

Calamo-pap3n-us. Reed papyrus or pen-paper. 

Catabolism. See Metabolism. 

Catharsis. Purgation or cleansing. Aristotle's esthetic theory 
that a little renders immune for much. 

Cerebration. Brain action, conscious or unconscious. 

Chorea. St. Vitus's dance; a nervous disease marked by irregular 
and involuntary movements of the limbs and face. 

Chrestomathy. A collection of extracts and choice pieces. 

367 



GLOSSARY 

Christenthum. The Christian behef; the spirit of Christianity. 

Commando exercises. Gymnastic exercises whose order is de- 
pendent upon the spoken command of the director. 

Cortex. The gray matter of the brain, mostly on its surface. 

Cortical. Pertaining to the cortex. 

Craniometry. The measurement of skulls. 

Cryptogamous. Having an obscure mode of fertilization; or, 
of plants that do not blossom. 

Cultus. A system of religious belief and worship. 

Deutschenthum. The spirit of the German people. 

Diathesis. A constitutional predisposition. 

Ephebic. Pertaining to the Greek system of instruction given 
to young men to fit them for citizenship; adolescent. 

Epigoni. Successors; followers who only follow. 

Epistemology. The theory of knowledge; that branch of logic 
which undertakes to explain how knowledge is possible and 
to define its limitations, meaning, and worth. 

Eupeptic. Having good digestion. 

Euphoria. The sense of well-being; of fullness of life. 

Eviration. Emasculation; loss of manly characteristics. 

Feral. Wild by nature; untamed; undomesticated. 

Formicary. An artificial ants' nest. 

Gemiith. Disposition; the entire affective soul and its habitual 
state. 

Hebetude. Dulness; stupidity. 

Hedonistic. Relating to hedonism, that form of Greek phil- 
osophy which taught that pleasure is the chief end of 
existence. 

Hetaera. A Greek courtesan. This class was often highly 
trained in music and social arts and represented the highest 
grade of culture among Greek women. 

Heterogeny. (1) The spontaneous generation of animals and 
vegetables, low in the scale of organization, from inorganic 
elements. (2) That kind of generation in which the parent, 
whether plant or animal, produces offspring differing in 
structure or habit from itself, but in w^hich after one or 
more generations the original form reappears. 

Heteronomous. Having a different name. 

Horology. The science of measuring time and of constructing 
instruments for that purpose. 

Hygeia. The Greek goddess of health; health. 

368 



GLOSSARY 

Hypermethodic. Methodic to excess; overmethodic. 

Hypertrophy. Excessive growth. 

Indiscerptible. Incapable of being destroyed by separation of 
parts. 

Inhibition. Interference with the normal result of a nervous 
excitement by an opposing force. 

Irradiation. The diffusion of nervous stimuli out of the path of 
normal discharge which, as a result of the excitation of a 
peripheral end organ, may excite other central organs than 
those directly connected with it. 

Kinesological. Pertaining to the science of tests and measure- 
ments of bodily strength. 

Klinesometer. An instrument for measuri^ muscular strength. 

Medullation. The investment of nerve fibers with a protective 
covering or medullary sheath, consisting of white, fat-like 
matter. 

Meristic. Pertaining to the levels or spinal and cerebral seg- 
ments of the body. 

Metabolism. The act or process by which, on the one hand, dead 
food is built up into living matter — anabolism, and by 
which, on the other, the living matter is broken down into 
simpler products within a cell or organism — catabolism. 

Metamorphosis. Change of form or structure; transformation. 

Metempsychosis. The doctrine of the transmigration of the 
soul from one body to another. 

Monophrastic. Pertaining to or consisting of a single phrase. 

Monotechnic. Pertaining to a single art or craft. 

Morphology. The science of form and structure of plants and 
animals without regard to function. 

Myology. The scientific knowledge of the muscular system. 

Mythopceic. Producing or having a tendency to produce myths. 

Noetic. Of, pertaining to, or conceived by, mind. 

Nuance. Slight shade; difference; distinction; degree. 

Orthogenic. Pertaining to right beginning and development. 

Orthopedic. Relating to the art of curing deformities. 

Ossuary. A depository of dry bones. 

Paleopsychic. Pertaining to the antiquity of the soul. 

Pantheistic. Relating to that doctrine which holds that the 
e-ntire phenomenal universe, including man and nature, is 
the ever-changing manifestation of God, who rises to self- 
consciousness and personality only in man. 

369 



GLOSSARY 

Patristics. That department of study occupied with the doc- 
trines and writings of the fathers of the Christian Church. 

Phobia. Excessive or morbid fear of anything. 

Phyletically. In accordance with the phylum or race; racially. 

Phyletic. Pertaining to a race or clan. 

Phylogeny. The history of the evolution of a species or group; 
tribal history; ancestral development as opposed to ontogeny 
or the development of the individual. 

Phylum. A term introduced by Haeckel to designate the great 
branches of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Each phy- 
lum may include several classes. 

Pickelhaube. The spiked helmet of the German army. 

Plankton. Sea animals and plants collectively; distinguished 
from coast or bottom forms and floating in a great mass. 

Polygamic (love). Pertaining to the habit of having more than 
one mate of the opposite sex. 

Polyphrastic. Having many phrases; pertaining to rambling, 
incoherent speech. 

Post-simian. Pertaining to an age later than that in which 
simian or monkey-like forms prevailed. 

Prenubile. Pertaining to the age before sexual maturity or 
marriageability is reached. 

Prie dieu. A praying desk. 

Propedeutic. Preliminary; introductory. 

Prophylactic. Any medicine or measure efficacious in prevent- 
ing disease. 

Pseudophobiac. Pertaining to a morbid condition in which the 
subject is continually in fear of having said something not 
strictly true. 

Psychogenesis. The origin and development of soul. 

Psychonomic. Pertaining to the laws of mind. 

Psychosis. Mental constitution or condition; any change in con- 
sciousness, especially if abnormal. 

Puberty. The age of sexual maturity. 

Pubescent. Relating to the dawning of puberty. 

Pygmoid. Of pygmy size and form. 

Rabulist. A chronic wrangler; one who argues about every- 
thing. 

Schema. A synopsis; a summary. In the Kantian sense, a 
general type. 

370 



GLOSSARY 

Schematism. An outline of any systematic arrangement; an 
outline. 

SuperfcBtation. A second conception some time after a prior 
one, by which two foetuses of different age exist together 
in the same female. Often used figuratively. 

Temibility. (From Italian temihile, to be feared.) The principle 
of adjustment of penalty to crime in just that degree nece&. 
sary to prevent a repetition of the criminal act. 

Tic. A nervous affection of the muscles; a twitching. 

Transcendental. In the Kantian system having an a priori 
character, transcending experience, presupposed in and 
necessary to experience. 

Traumata. Wounds. 

Traumatism. A wound; any morbid condition produced by 
wounds or other external violence. 

Verbigeration. The continual utterance of certain words or 
phrases at short intervals, without reference to their mean- 
ing, as seen in insane Gedankenfiucht or rapid flight of 
thought. 



371 



INDEX 



Abstract words, need of, 248. 

Accessory and fundamental 
movements, 9. 
- Accuracy, of memory, 270, 273. 
overdone, 12, 22, 237. 

Activity of children, motor, 
14-22. 

Adolescence, biography and lit- 
erature of, 141-206. 
characterized, 6, 236-238. 

Agriculture, 31-34, 324, 325. 

Alternations of physical and 
psychic states, 47, 81, 91, 
92. 

Altruism of country children, 
215. 
^ of woman, outlet for, 290. 

Amphimixis, psychic, basis of, 
294. 

Anger, 94, 99. 

Anthropometry and ideal of gym- 
nastics, 61-63. 

Arboreal life and the hand, 11. 

Art study, 42-45, 48-52. 

Arts and crafts movement, 42- 
45. 

Associations devised or guided 
by adults, 230-233. 

Astronomy, 316. 

Athletic festivals in Greece, 75, 
76. , 



Athletics as a conversation topic, 
110. 
dangers and defects of, 111. 
records in, 68, 69. 
Attention, fostered by commando 
exercises, 57. 
rhythm in, 47. 
spontaneous, 47. 
Authority and adolescence, 234, 

333-336. 
Autobiographies of boyhood, 

142-146. 
Automatisms, motor, causes and 
kinds of, 14-22. 
control and serialization of, 

18-20. 
danger of premature control 

of, 18. 
desirable, 16-18. 

Bachelor women, 290, 304-306. 

Basal muscles, development of, 
23. 

Basal powers, development of, 
80, 81. 

Bathing, 105-107. 

Beauty, age of feminine, 289. 

Belief, habit and muscle deter- 
mining, 8, 117. 

Bible, the, influence of, in adoles- 
cence, 216. 



373 



INDEX 



Bible, the, methods of teaching, 
331. 
study of, for girls, 218, 314, 

315. 
study of, in German method 

of will training, 329. 
study of, order in, 358. 
study of, postponed, 355. 
study of, preparation for, 358. 
Biography and adolescence, 141- 

206. 
Blood vessels, expansion at 
puberty, 236. 
, Blushing, characteristic of puber- 
ty, 236. 
Body training, Greek, 75, 76. 
Botany, 316. 
Boxing, 95. 
Boys, age of little affection in, 

235. 
^ dangers of coeducation for, 

286-293, 295-297. 
. differences between, and girls, 
281-283, 285-288, 291- 
293, 295. 
latitude in conduct and studies 
of, before puberty, 235, 
236. 
puberty in, characteristics of, 
236, 237. 
Brain action, unity in, 19, 20. 
\ Bullying, 93, 94, 122. 
Bushido, 97, 141. 

Cakewalk, 103. 

Castration, functional in women, 

306. 
Catharsis, Aristotle's theory of, 

3, 363. 
Character and muscles, 7-9, 

343. 



Children, faults and crimes of, 
120-140. 
motor activity of, 14-22. 
motor defects of, 21, 22. 
selfishness of, 235. 
Chivalry, medieval, 141. 
Chorea, 13, 16, 22. 
Christianity, muscular, 55. 
Chums and cronies, 222, 223. ^' 
Church, femininity in the, 104, 

105. 
City children vs. country chil- 
dren, 215, 216. 
Civilized men, savages physically 

superior to, 28. • 
CHmbing, hill, 108. 

muscles, age for exercise of, 
23. 
Coeducation, dangers in, 286- 

297. 
College, coeducation in, 284- 
286, 289-297. 
English requirements of, 264, 

265. 
woman's ideal school and, 
293-295,309-321. 
Combat, personal, as exercise, 

93-99. 
Commando exercises, 57. 
restricted for girls, 311. 
Concentration, 117. 
Concreteness in modern language 
study, criticized, 248-252. 
Conduct, mechanized, 336, 337. 
of Italian schoolboys tabu- 
lated, 121, 122. 
weather and, 123, 124. 
Confessionalism, of young wom- 
en, 166-173. 
passional inducement to, 363. 
Conflict, see Combat. 



374 



INDEX 



Control, nervous, through danc- 
ing, 90. 
of anger, 94, 99. 
of brute instincts, 94. 
of children's movements, 18- 
20. 
Conversation, atretics in, 110. 
degeneration in, causes of, 
249, 250. 
Conversion, 365, 366. 
Coordination loosened at adoles- 
cence, 22. 
inherited tendencies of mus- 
cular, 80. 
Corporal punishment, 338-341. 
Country children vs. city chil- 
dren, 215, 216. 
Crime, juvenile, 126, 131-140. 
causes of, 134. 
education and, 135. 
reading and, 137. 
Cruelty, a juvenile fault, 93, 120, 

121,123,133. 
Culture heroes, 317, 329. 

Dancing, 88-93, 311. 

Deadly sins, the seven, vs. mod- 
ern juvenile faults, 123. 

Debate and will-training, 342, 
343. 

Doll curve, 82. 

Domesticity, 319. 

Dramatic instinct of puberty, 
128. 

Drawing, curve of stages of, 48- 
50. 

Duehng, 95, 96. 

Education, art in, 42-45, 50-52. 
crime and, 135, 140. 
industrial, 29-34, 324, 325. 

25 375 



Education, intellectual, 234-276, 
manual, 35-52. 
moral and religious, 324-366. 
of boys, 235, 236, 286-293, 

295-297. 
of girls, 277-323. 
physical, 53-72. 
Effort, as a developing force, 47, 

347-350. 
Emotions, dancing com^pletest 
language of the, 90. 
religion directed to, 216. 
Endurance, 347-350. 
Energy and laziness, 91, 92. 
English, language and literature, 
pedagogy of, 238-265. 
pedagogic degeneration in, 

causes of, 240-252. 
requirements of college, 264, 

265. 
sense language, dangers of, 
248-252. 
Ennui, 34.1, 342. 
Erect position and true life, 10. 
Ethics, study of, criticized, 140. 
Ethical judgments of children, 

220-222. 
Euphoria and exercise, 65. 
Evolution, movement as a meas- 
ure of, 10. 
Exercise, health and. 28. 
measurements and, 61, 62. 
music and, 57. 
nascent periods and, 81. 
rhythm and, 57. 

Farm work, 31-34. 
Fatigue, at puberty, 236. 

chorea and, 9. 

not a cause for punishment, 
342. 



INDEX 



Fatigue, play and, 114, 115. 
restlessness expressive of, 16. 
result of labor with defective 

psychic impulsion, 116. 
rhythm of activity and, 91, 92. 
will-culture and, 117. 
Faults of children, 120-126. 
Favorite sounds and words, 252- 

258. 
Fecundity of college women, 

280. 
Femininity in the church, 104. 
in the school and college, 287, 

288,291,292. 
Feminists, 293, 294. 
Fighting, 93. 
Flogging, 338-341. 
Foreign languages, dangers of, 

241-244. 
France, religious training in, 329, 

330. 
Friendships of adolescence, 209, 

210, 222, 223. 
Fundamental and accessory, 9, 

23. 
Future life, as a school teaching, 

330,331. 

Games, 73-119. 
groups, 100. 
Panhellenic, 69, 75. 
Gangs, organized juvenile, 131. 
Genius, early development of, 

147-152. 
Germany, will-training in, 328, 

329. 
Girl graduates, aversion to mar- 
riage of, 289, 296, 298, 
303, 304. 
fecundity of. 280. 
sterility of, 280, 304. 



Girls, and boys, differences be- 
tween, 281-283, 285-288, 
291-293, 295. 

coeducation for, dangers of, 
286-297. 

education of, 277-323. 

education of, humanistic, 293- 
295,321. 

education of, manners in, 312. 

education of, more difficult 
than of boys, 283. 

education of, nature in, 315- 
317. 

education of, regularity in, 
312. 

education of, religion in, 314, 
315. 

ideal school and curriculum 
for, 309-321. 

overdrawing their energy, 305. 
Grammar, place of, 240, 244- 

246. 
Greece, athletic festivals in, 75. 
Greek body training, 76. 
Group games, 100, 101. 
Growth, at puberty, 236-238. 

gymnastics and its effect oh, 
65, 66. 

of muscle structure and func- 
tion, measure of, 9. 

periods, 81. 

rhythmic, 81. 
Gymnastics, effect on growth, 
its, 65, 66. 

ideal of, and anthropometry, 
61-63. 

ideals, its four unharmonized, 
and, 63, 64. 

military ideals and, 56. 

nascent periods and, 81. 

patriotism and, 55. 



376 



INDEX 



Gymnastics, proportion and 
measurement for, criti- 
cized, 62. 
Swedish, 53-55, 57, 62, 311. 

Habits and muscle, 8, 117. 

Hand and arboreal life, 10. 

Health, exercise and, 28. 
of girls, 286, 302, 308-313. 

Heredity, a factor in develop- 
ment, 80, 81. 

High School, the, coeducation in, 
287-289. 
language study and, 240-257. 

Hill-cHmbing, 108. 

Historic interest, growth of, 266- 
268. 

Home, restraint of, detrimental, 
208. 

Honor, among hoodlums, 133. 
in sports, 95-97, 110. 

Hoodlums, 109, 131-134. 

Hysteria, 364. 

Imagination, at puberty, 236. 

of children, 127. 

play and, 118. 
Individuality, growth of, at 

puberty, 237. 
Industrial education, 29-34. 
Industry and movement, 24. 
Inhibition, 18. 
Intellect, adolescence in, 236, 

237. 
Intemperance, 297, 298. 

Knightly ideas of youth, 141. 
Knowing and doing, 77, 343. 

Langijage, concreteness in, de- 
generation through, 248- 
252. 



Language, dangers of, through 
eye and hand, 246-248. 
precision curve of, 254. 
vs. literature, 244-246. 
Latin, danger of, 241-244. 
Laughter, 114. 
Laziness and energy, 91, 92. 
Lies, 126-131. 

Literary men, youth of, 148-155, 
175-190. 
women, youth of, 158-175. 
Literature and adolescence, 
141-206. 
language vs., 244-246. 

Machinery and movement, 24. 
Mammae, loss of function of, 305. 
Manners, 22. 

in girls' education, 312. 
Manual training, 35-52. 

defects and criticisms of, 38, 

39. 
difficulties of, 36. 
Marriage, dangers in delay of, 
298-300, 304, 305. 
influenced by coeducation . 

280, 289-292, 295-297. 
influenced by college training, 
290, 294, 298, 304. 
Mastery in art-craft, equipment 

for, 37. 
Maternity, dangers of deferred, 

304, 305. 
Measurements and exercise, 61. 
Memory, accuracy, age, and 
kinds of, 270-276. 
sex curve of types of, 271. 
Military drill, 101,102. 

ideals and gymnastics, 56. 
Mind and motility, 7. 
Money sense, 219, 220. 



377 



INDEX 



Monthly period and Sabbath, 

285,286,312,313. 
Motherhood, training for, 309, 

319. 
Motor, activity, primitive, 25. 

automatisms, 14. 

defects of children, 21. 

defects, general, 27. 

economies, 59. 

powers, general growth of, 10- 
14. 

precocity, 13. 

psychoses, muscles and, 7. 

recapitulation, 77, 108. 

regularity, 88. 
Movement and industry, 24. 
Movements, passive, 107. 

precocity of, 12, 22, 
Muscle tension and thought, 12. 
Muscles, per cent by weight of 
body, 7. 

character and, 7-9, 343. 

motor psychoses and, 7. 

small, and thought, 12. 

will and, 7-9, 343. 
Muscular Christianity, 55. 
Music and exercise, 57. 
Myths, study of, 318. 

Nascent periods and exercises, 

81. 
Nature in girls' education, 315- 

317. 

Obedience, 234, 333-336. 

Panhellenic games, 69, 75. 
Passive movements, 107. 
Patriotism and gymnastics, 56. 
Peace, man's normal state, 34. 
Periodicity in growth, 81. 
in women, 285, 286, 312, 313. 



Philology, dangers of, 244-246. 
Plasticity of growth at puberty, 

237. 
Play, 73-119. 

course of study, 113. 
imagination and, 118. 
prehistoric activity and, 73- 

75. 
problem, 108, 109. 
sex and, 102, 112. 
stages and ages of, 79-86. 
work and, 114-119. 
Plays and games, codification of, 

111. 
Precocity, motor, 12, 22. 

in the motor sphere, 81. 
Predatory organizations, 131- 

134. 
Primitive rtiotor activity, 25, 26. 
Punishments, 337-342. 

in school, causes of, 122. 

Reading age, 258-265. 
crime and, 137. 
curve, 254. 
Reason, development of, 268. 
Recapitulation and motor hered- 
ity, 77. 
Records in athletics, 68, 69. 
Regularity in education of girls, 

312,313. 
Religious training, age for, 364- 
366. 
forgirls, 314, 315. 
in Europe, 328-330. 
premature, 362-364. 
two methods of, 330, 331. 
Retardation as a means of broad- 
ening, 314. 
Revivalists, 315. 
Rhythm, exercise and, 57- 



378 



INDEX 



Rhythm, in primitive activities, 
86. 
of work and rest, 88. 

Savages physically superior to 

civilized men, 28. 
School, language study in, 238- 
258. 

need of enthusiasm in, 208. 

punishments in, causes of, 122. 

reading in, 258, 259. 
Scientific men, youth of, 156- 

158. 
Sedentary life, 24. 
Selfishness of children, 235. 
Sex, play and, 112,113. 

sports and, 102-104. 
Slang curve, 254. 

value of, 255, 256. 
Sleep, in education of girls, 310. 
Sloyd, origin, aims, criticism of, 

40-42. 
Social activities, 131. 

organizations of youth, 131- 
134, 224-233. 
Solitude, 222. 

Sounds, favorite, and words, 252. 
Sports, values of different, 93-99. 

codification of , 111. 

sexual influence in, 102-104. 

team work in, 100, 101. 
Spurtiness, 13. 
Sterility of girl graduates, 280, 

304. 
Story-telling, interest in, 258. 
Struggle-for-lifeurs, 33. 
Students' associations, 227. 
Stuttering and stammering, 21. 
Swedish gymnastics, 53-55, 57, 

62,311. 
Swimming, 105-107. 



Talent, early development of, 

147. 
Teachers, aversions to, 211. 
Team spirit, 100. 
Technical courses, need of, 52. 
Telegraphic skill. 45. 
Temibility, 138. 
Theft, juvenile, 122, 123, 131. 
Thought and muscle tension, 8, 

12, 117. 
Transitory nature of youthful 

experiences, 144. 
Tree life and erect postur*; , 10. 
Truancy, 124-126. 
Truth-telling. 129. 
Turner movement, 53. 

Unmarried women, dangers to, 
298-300. 

Vagabondage, 125. 

Vagrancy, 125. 

Virility in the Church, 104. 

Weather and conduct, 123, 124. 
Will, muscles and, 7, 8, 12, 117, 
326, 327, 343. 

training, 327-351. 
Womanly, the eternal, 306, 322. 
Women, bachelors, 290, 304-306. 

dangers to, in not marrying, 
298-300, 304, 305. 

education of, ideal, 309-321. 

ideal, 321, 322. 

young, confessionalism of, 
166-173. 
Work at its best, play, 119. 

play and, 114. 

rest and, rhythm of, 88. 
Wrestling, 98, 99. 

Young Men's Christian Associa- 
tion, 55. 



379 



(1) 



1 



! 



